A Life With Vigor
by Straightjacketed
Summary: Elizabeth looks back on the Vigors and the stories of their users throughout Columbia's many different iterations, from the Firemen to the Zealots of the Lady - and beyond.
1. Fink's Folly

**A/N: This has been in the works for a long time, ladies and gentlemen. I should probably explain a thing or two before I begin, just to put this in context - feel free to skip the intro if you're not interested.**

 **I hate _Burial At Sea._ I really do. I ragequit over the plot no less than three times before finally giving up and watching someone else's playthrough, but there are too many things to talk about, too many problems to address without turning this fanfic into a review. But putting aside the fact that the plot requires Elizabeth to lose to a bog standard Big Daddy, putting aside the contrived attempts to waft controversy away from Daisy Fitzroy, putting aside the fact that Elizabeth's so-called redemption ends up making her responsible for the civil war, putting aside the fact that the game couldn't be bothered to make Sally anything other than a living plot motivator... there's two major points I need to address.**

 **First of all, Columbia should be gone. The end of _Bioshock Infinite_ made it abundantly clear that the only way to stop Columbia from "drowning in flame the mountains of man" is by wiping it from history. It. Should. Be. GONE. This isn't just a matter of saving New York; at Comstock House, Future!Elizabeth announces that once the surface world is conquered, they're moving on to the rest of multiverse. Why is this not important?**

 **Secondly, I found the explanation behind Vigors _really_ boring. Before _Burial At Sea,_ one theory/explanation wafting about the internet suggested that the Vigor were actually derived from Elizabeth's powers, and I liked that because it kept the city's strengths tied to the exploitation of Tears. The whole business behind "drinkable plasmids" just seemed lazy and uninspired: it felt like a cheap way of justifying the use of flasks instead of syringes - take a look at the anachronistic Kinetoscopes lurking around Rapture for more sloth. More to the point, the effects and visual design behind Vigors just don't match plasmids - why bother to add the flickering effect of the Tears to the powers if Tears weren't involved?**

 **So, this new story essentially flies in the face of everything that happened in _Burial At Sea._ If you liked _Burial At Sea_ , good for you. If you want to defend it, please do. If you want to correct me for misunderstanding a key point, _do so_. If you want to flame me for hating _Burial At Sea,_ PLEASE DO IT. I desperately need to know that someone out there gives more of a damn about the game than the developers. And please, forgive me if elements of the story sound like me trying to justify less agreeable aspects of BAS; as much as I just wanted to let my issues with the game rest and create a whole new narrative in this fic, my subconsciousness had other ideas.**

 **So, with that out of the way, please enjoy the first chapter of this new story, and I hope you enjoy my take on the Vigors. Read, review and above all enjoy!**

 **Disclaimer: The _Bioshock_ series doesn't belong to me in any universe. Eagle-eyed readers, keep an eye out for hidden crossovers!**

* * *

Why am I writing this?

It's been six years since Columbia – at least, I'm reasonably certain it's been six years: time is hard to measure when you've spread it out over as many worlds and time periods as I have, but the Luteces assure me that it has indeed been six years since the four of us wiped Comstock's floating Eden from reality. Six long, complicated years of hardship, adjustment, recovery, and a trail of hard-won victories.

True, I still have nightmares of the nightmare Columbia might have been, I still don't really know what I am or what will become of me, and I don't think I'll ever be sure of my purpose in life… but in spite of all my fears, regrets and doubt, I think I'm almost content with my life as it is.

After all, I have so many people to share it with and so many different ways to appreciate it: with the Luteces, I can study the possibility space and all its infinite wonders; with Booker and Anna, I can enjoy a relatively normal life as Anna's "brainy big sister"; with Jack, Eleanor, Brigid, Charles, and the Little Sisters they rescued from Rapture, I partake of their friendship as a fellow freak and survivor of a utopia gone horribly wrong… and by myself, I can use my powers to help others across the multiverse.

So I ask myself again, why the hell am I writing this?

I should be content that Columbia is dead, gone before it could conquer the worlds of the possibility space. Why should I want to prolong the legend of that godforsaken city? Why can't I just leave it as it is, a cloud of defunct memories adrift in the backwaters of space and time?

Well, as strange is it may seem, I don't want it to remain forgotten. The more I think about it, the more I want to see that people can learn something – _anything_ – from the nightmare of Columbia. And after all, there are so many untold stories, so many triumphs and tragedies, intrigues and atrocities, marvels and monsters left unexplored in Columbia's memory: in the all the iterations of our journey across the city, Booker and I only had a chance to glimpse a handful of these stories in passing, but now that I can explore the memories of the city I erased, I have it within my power to ensure that these tales aren't lost to the maelstroms of time and space. I want someone to remember all those people. I want someone to remember Booker as he _was_ … and I want someone to remember me as _I_ was _._

Oddly enough, I don't think I'm alone in this respect: Jack and Eleanor have already published their accounts of Rapture, and some of the Splicers Brigid was able to cure have been writing their own vast testimony of the construct and fall of Andrew Ryan's paradise.

Then again, it's not as if I've been _quiet_ about any of this up until today: God only knows I've told the tale of Columbia enough times for the Little Sisters to learn it off by heart. So, maybe it's time for me to commit Columbia and all its many stories to paper. Of course, considering all the variations of Columbia I've visited and catalogued, either firsthand or via the memory cloud, it might take some time… but, for once in my life, I'm in no hurry.

And perhaps it's appropriate that I begin with one of the more obscure stories: the tale of Jeremiah Fink's Great Folly.

* * *

Whenever I tell the story of Columbia, I'm invariably told that it sounds like something out of a fairy tale – and with good reason: a flying city, a princess in a tower, a dragon patrolling the skies, a vengeful ghost leading armies of the dead, gateways to other worlds, potions that grant impossible powers… my life sounds like something out of legend, even to those who've participated in a few legends of their own. Even Eleanor has trouble believing it.

So, I suppose there's only one way I can begin this story: once upon a time…

Once upon a time, there was a thief, and his name was Jeremiah Fink.

Before Columbia took to the skies, he was a petty businessman, a middling factory owner, a dabbler in industrial engineering and a part-time con artist: more often than not, he was the shill of more powerful industrialists, persuading workers, engineers, debtors and even fellow businessmen to sign on the dotted line in return for a bonus from the robber barons that were his masters.

Unsurprisingly, he longed to be one of them, but their monopolies were airtight and the doors of management were forever barred to Johnny-come-latelies like him, leaving the young Jeremiah Fink seemingly condemned to a lifetime of entrepreneurial mediocrity.

Then Columbia left the ground for the first time, and the great city found itself in need of factories – and those who could manage them. Hungry for the wealth and fame that awaited the first industrialists to invest in America's shining bride, he led the charge on Columbia's verdant industrial playground and fastened on every available opportunity like a lamprey: with no old boys club and no well-established competitors blocking his path, Fink's businesses flourished and prospered, thanks in no small part due to his lack of scruples and his ability to provide for Columbia's elite as the city grew and more isolated from the Sodom Below.

When Comstock finally declared himself an enemy of the United States, it was Fink who was able to solve Columbia's sudden shortage of "menials" by drawing upon connections other Founders were too "upright" to exploit; when the city's Irish population grew too offensive for the bigoted majority to tolerate, it was Fink who offered them a place at Finkton – out of sight and out of mind; and when Comstock needed a man knowledgeable enough to eliminate the Luteces and make it seem accidental, the job went straight to Fink.

But it was Fink's use of the Tears that gave his already-expansive empire a chance to rise to truly Olympian heights. Even as the richest man in Columbia, Fink was still a shameless thief at heart, and by the time he first encountered a random Tear, he was also a self-righteous intellectual leech without a single innovative thought in his head: more than half of his accolades and honours were acquired by taking credit for the achievements of his underlings, and the most prominent "inventions" of Fink MFG were no exception.

Peering out across the possibility space, the businessman glimpsed other worlds and discovered countless opportunities for profit: stealing or documenting a vast array of machines from the worlds of the multiverse, he reverse-engineered them in Columbia, often without bothering to modify the stolen invention beyond a few perfunctory cosmetic details.

Vending machines, advanced personal firearms, automaton transports and turrets, Motorized Patriots, the infamous Handymen and even the mighty Songbird were all introduced through Fink's intellectual pillaging, elevating a business empire to an irreplaceable component of Columbia's society.

In the end, however, Fink's excess was his own undoing: not only did his gluttonous exploitation of the downtrodden inspire them to revolt under Daisy Fitzroy's banner, but many of the inventions he so gleefully plagiarized ended up in the hands of his enemies – thanks, in part, to his unwillingness to alter the stolen blueprints more than he felt was necessary.

The vending machines, for example, were overdecorated copies of Rapture's automated armouries, right down to their habit of dispensing ammunition alongside soft drinks and confection – a practise that drew in additional funds from thousands of paranoid citizens and desperate police officers alike, but one that only ended up putting ammunition in the hands of the Vox Populi. Once the designs obtained from the wreck of the _S.S. Madame Du Pompadour_ were properly implemented, the Motorized Patriots and other automata were roaring successes, but their lack of security failsafes ended up once again swelling the ranks of the Vox Populi – particularly once they began seizing control of the factories.

The Handyman autobodies, reverse-engineered from Omni-Consumer Products' discarded prototypes as they were, emerged as possibly the biggest failure on Fink MFG's record: while consumers were intrigued by the possibility of immortality through mechanical augmentation, the fact that the fully-converted Handymen were effectively condemned to perpetual agony dissuaded many potential customers – forcing Fink to stage industrial accidents in his own factories just so he'd have the organic material to produce his own army of security brutes; not only was this a needlessly costly approach to boosting sales, but in the end, more than half of his own mechanized army turned on him in a flurry of agonized revenge.

And as for Songbird… well, my beloved guardian did more to end the menace of Columbia than any of Fink's plagiarized inventions. The mental conditioning, the mechanical exoskeleton, the augmented strength – all of these traits were stolen from Rapture, and all of them gave Booker and I the power to wipe Columbia from the timeline and save the multiverse.

With all these ambitious mistakes in mind, I sometimes wonder if Fink ever realized that he'd effectively doomed himself in his reckless pursuit of profit, or if he remained blissfully oblivious to his imminent demise up until the very moment that Daisy Fitzroy put a gun to his head. I can't be entirely sure, for even with the echoes of Columbia's many iterations drifting through the endless either of the possibility space, I still can't read minds.

In some dead timelines, I've seen him fight back – one of my other selves has a rather vivid memory of him seizing control of an articulated cargo lifter and trying desperately to crush the crowd of revolutionaries under the giant automaton's bulk – and in others, he merely cowered and begged for mercy, but the reasoning behind his actions remains, more often than not, unknowable.

The Luteces have discussed the topic with me on the rare occasions when I can steer the conversation away from multiversal physics, and neither of them spare much thought for Fink's intellect – not much of a surprise, considering that he murdered them. As Robert often puts it, anyone who honestly believed that a perfectly functional manufacturing district would be improved by a fifty-foot golden statue of themselves probably didn't have the humility to imagine their own demise.

And, as Rosalind often jokes, a well-documented cocaine addiction and a case of untreated neurosyphilis probably didn't help much either; having listened to the man's public service announcements and read his diaries at length, I'm tempted to add a diagnosis of Narcissistic Personality Disorder to the list, but that might be beyond my purview.

In the end, I can only conclude that Jeremiah Fink spent his last days as he spent the rest of his glory days in Columbia, still conducting extravagant parties at the Good Time Club, still dreaming up new ways to exploit his workforce, still building his mythical animal kingdom of workers – with Fink the Lion as the King of Beasts. He died as he lived – a man too entranced by the ripe stench of money and ego to ever think the end would dare come for him.

However, out of all the mistakes on his expansive record, one that sticks in the memory more than any other is the creation of the Vigors – in part for the role I played in their development.

* * *

Out of all the stories of Columbia I have told over the years, the story of the Vigors has received the least attention.

To the Little Sisters, they're just magic potions that give the drinker unimaginable power, but Jack and Eleanor always want to know more. Of course, once I discovered what the Vigors really were, I wasn't exactly in a hurry to talk about them: the truth was frankly embarrassing and more than a little bit disgusting.

But as uncomfortable as the topic makes me, now that I've set out to record all of Columbia's untold stories, I've obliged to include the stories of the Vigors. So, we return to the magical city in the clouds to uncover the truth of its enchanted potions:

In an unusual departure from Fink's usual _modus operandi,_ the Vigors were not actually plagiarized.

True, Fink had observed similar implanted superpowers throughout the multiverse, most prominently in the form of Rapture's plasmids, the Outsider's Mark, the Melange of Arrakis, and the Escafil device – all of which he attempted to acquire.

However, despite his best efforts, he had never been able to obtain working samples through the Tears: sometimes the Tear was too unstable to retrieve physical samples, at other times the technology was simply impossible to reverse-engineer. Even after retrieving the body of a splicer from the ruins of Pauper's Drop, ADAM could not be replicated with Columbian technology, and by the time a gateway to Rapture's laboratories stabilized, Fink had already found a much cheaper alternative.

No, the Vigors were actually the creation of Rosalind and Robert Lutece, one of many patents that Fink was awarded by Comstock for his help in assassinating the troublesome scientists. For years prior to their "death," the idea of the Vigor had been explored in detail but never implemented outside a laboratory, the Luteces considering it a minor facet of the great vistas of space-time exploration and control they studied on a daily basis. Needless to say, neither Rosalind nor Robert were truly interested in making their invention a commercial success, having only patented it in an idle attempt to boost their annual research budget; it took Fink's aggressive eye for exploitation to transform their modest discovery into a citywide enterprise.

And the source of this discovery?

Me.

After I was incarcerated at Monument Island and the Siphon was installed under the tower, the Luteces soon discovered that the machine they had designed to limit my powers had a rather unexpected side-benefit. Originally, the energy the Siphon leeched from me was only meant to power its own machinery, ensuring that my abilities would remain suppressed even if the generators went offline; however, as it descended from my quarters through the base of the tower, the dimensional energies began radiating from the conduits into neighbouring systems, including the plumbing.

Water began to behave _very_ oddly around the tower: pipes were blocked by sprouting crystals, taps dispensed molten lava, and bathrooms became infested by metallic fungal growths. But it wasn't until a lab assistant began sprouting talons and feathers shortly after washing his hands that Rosiland and Robert recognized the problem: thanks to exposure to the undiluted energies of the time-space continuum, minute Tears were being "earthed" in the water, resulting in a liquid that could effectively bridge the gulf between realities.

Though they were able to shield the conduits and prevent further infections of the tower's plumbing, the Luteces continued to study the side-effects under more controlled circumstances: eventually, they found a means of directing the Tears in the afflicted water to specific destinations in the possibility space, negating the more unpredictable side-effects and allowing those who drank the tainted water to manifest powers from other worlds.

The effects of these concoctions were temporary, usually requiring further ingestion in order to sustain the acquired traits for longer than an hour – hence the refillable bottles and tanks the Vigors were made available in; however, as Booker later discovered, those who'd already been exposed to major tear activity were able to maintain their powers on a permanent or near-permanent basis.

By December 1908, the Luteces had already isolated the Tears that would create most of the eventual product line, as well as those that would create the magnetic shield they would later give to Booker during his journey across Columbia. Following their deaths in 1909, Fink took over their labs and expanded the simple laboratory-based process into a massive assembly line: redirecting the conduits of the Siphon into one of his many pumping stations, he directed the energies leeched from me into gallon after gallon of water, then set to work on directing the Tears in the infected fluid, eventually creating what he officially titled "Vigors."

As it happens, I didn't discover the truth behind the Vigors until well after the Siphon was destroyed, a fact I'm _very_ thankful for: being leered at from behind two-mirrors and photographed in the shower by hidden cameras was disgusting enough even before the technicians started taking the snapshots home with them, but having the same voyeurs turning my powers – _a part of my being_ – into a drinkable product would probably have driven me to a nervous breakdown.

In hindsight, I probably wouldn't have found the whole thing so revolting if Fink hadn't decided to call the Siphon "a milking machine."

I'm not even going to mention what he called _me_.

In the beginning, the Vigors were restricted to Columbia's military elite: the Firemen, the Zealots of the Lady, the Mariners, the Centurions, the Preachers of the Way, and the Cherubim – all carried a flask or tank of Vigor. However, Fink wanted more than a pittance from Comstock: he wanted customers throughout the city, having been inspired by the vast popularity of Plasmids in Rapture.

Unfortunately, he failed to account for the circumstances that made Plasmids such a roaring success in the first place: a code of moral relativism, an atmosphere of scientific optimism and a downtrodden populace in desperate need of compensatory power. When Fink finally made the Vigors available on the open market, his chosen customers were Columbia's upper/middle classes, god-fearing men and women with little trust in science and little interest in home defence.

For all the years Vigors were in production, less than five percent of Columbia's civilian populace used them: the Tear-induced visions suffered by first-time drinkers often discouraged future customers, and the flickering deformities that regular users periodically manifested only soured first impressions further; on a deeper level, many of the highly-conservative Founders were disquieted by the notion of miracles being mass-produced, and some of the more old-fashioned of them wondered aloud if there was something Satanic at the heart of Finkton – the product "Devil's Kiss" not helping much.

And when the negative side-effects of Vigors became apparent in the more habitual users – most prominently in the Zealots and Firemen – Fink MFG's client base plummeted: the effects of dimensional merging were disastrous enough if only inflicted on the human mind; when infected on the body, the results were often beyond description – to the point that many iterations of Columbia featured Josiah Saltonstall himself petitioning Comstock for an end to the civilian use of Vigors.

Like all of Fink's products, the Vigors only ended up fuelling the Vox Populi: the fact that even the Black and Irish members of the population could avail themselves to the "Divine Gift" of the Vigor did much to discredit Comstock's racist dogma. And when enough of the product was obtained by Daisy's army, they used it to wreak havoc upon the factories of Fink MFG.

In countless iterations of Columbia's dying days, Daisy's final charge on Fink's office was accompanied by an honour guard of Vigor-junkies, men and women encrusted with the crystalline growths of Shock Jockey and writhing with the tentacles of Undertow; and while they slaughtered the industrialist's bodyguards, Daisy cornered Fink in the ruins of his failing empire and put a bullet squarely between his piggy little eyes.

Thus ends the tale of Jeremiah Fink, beginning with fortune and ending in folly.

* * *

A/N: _Coming up next - Possession!_


	2. Possession

" _With just a whisper, they're all ears…"_

Of all the Vigors produced by Fink MFG, Possession was unique, not only for its unusually specific usages, comparatively limited sales and unorthodox source, but for the simple fact that out of all Fink's product line, it truly embodied the spirit of Columbia: domineering, manipulative, and intrinsically destructive.

It was among the last of the Vigors to be concocted and the last to arrive on the open market: initially, it was only used by the engineers of Columbia for commanding less-than-pliable machinery, easily bypassing the hours of recalibrations that such actions would normally have required. However, when Fink discovered a means of further stabilizing the Tears within the fluid, he unearthed its capacity to control other human beings for short periods of time, swiftly bringing the Vigor to the attention of the Columbian military.

Over the course of its tenure among the army, Possession was adopted by commanding officers, double-agents and saboteurs for use in front-line combat: Vox Populi were often too busy attempting to suppress their mind-warped comrades to fend off the Founders, and the more reluctant soldiers found their bodies marching into battle against their will. Likewise, on the rare occasion that the early Vox were able to rewire Columbian automata for use in combat, Possession-users were able to easily turn the tide in their favour.

Suicides were common among the human victims, but not always guaranteed: though the psychological side-effects usually included chronic depression and a sense of cognitive dissonance second only to Tear Sickness in sheer potency, self-destruction usually only occurred in those who'd betrayed their deepest beliefs over the course of their time under the influence (killing their friends, serving the False Shepherd, etc). Nonetheless, these suicides were numerous enough to make Possession a celebrated instrument of propaganda in several of Columbia's iterations: during a special sermon delivered to Columbia's military, Comstock claimed that Possession gave them the means to "cure" the Vox Populi of their delusional ideals and show them the error of their ways; the suicides were simply the end result of the remorse that the rebels would feel upon realizing the magnitude of the atrocities they had committed against "God's natural order."

In some particularly bloodthirsty timelines, it was common for the Founders to film the effects of Possession on Vox POWs and broadcast the results to public cinemas, especially if the interrogators could convince the mind-warped victims to recant and beg forgiveness for their sins before the suicide instinct kicked in. Many of the Founders hoped that Daisy Fitzroy herself could be given the same treatment when they finally captured her, but the rebel leader eluded their grasp time and again, and in the end the plan was discarded as the Vox began gaining ground.

Outside the military, however, Possession saw limited civilian use even by Vigor standards: initially, the prospect of taming stubborn machinery drew great interest from those who actually had to deal with technology on a daily basis, and the lack of Tear-induced deformities made it attractive to casual users; indeed, the occasional manifestations of tiny ethereal maidens and tongues of heatless flame almost made Possession a success in its own right, with savvy executives marketing it as "The Gentlest of Vigors."

However, Fink's misguided ad campaign presenting the Vigor as a "love potion" quickly soured the product's reputation, and only ended up drawing customers from a very small and particularly hateful segment of the populace. Given the prudishness of Columbian society and Comstock's religious conservatism, advertisements featuring eligible bachelors surrounded by harems of Possession-enthralled bathing beauties were met with a lukewarm reception at best; at worst, moral crusaders like Saltonstall were calling for it to be pulled from the market. As such, it was used only behind closed doors, especially by those intending to use the Vigor as a date-rape drug: appropriately enough, Possession had its heyday in the dimly-lit booths of the Good Time Club, where Fink and his lieutenants regularly used the Vigor to coerce dancers and waitresses into acts too depraved even by the club's normal standards.

Given its fringe usage, the long-term side-effects of Possession were not widely known except in a handful of Columbia's iterations: unlike more powerful Vigors such as Murder Of Crows and Shock Jockey, the comparatively high cost in dimensional salts kept it from being used on a regular basis, and even the true enthusiasts of the product preferred to use it only in times of celebration – which quickly became rare as the battles with the Vox grew more brutal. As such, the addiction and physical abnormalities caused by Possession remained unknown until well into Fitzroy's takeover, and the mental disturbances it induced never reached the public – in no small part due to the fact that its most widely-known users were already sociopaths. In the end, the long-term effects of the Vigor were only seen in the military elite who utilized it on the battlefield (see below).

Similarly, it took some time for the societal drawbacks of Possession to appear in the spotlight. It wasn't until Columbian authorities finally noticed the sudden rise in petty crime that they realized that Fink had once again inadvertently screwed over his own business: as Booker quickly discovered, Possession could be used to steal from Fink-branded automata like the vending machines and ticket collectors, and while it could have been possible to hardwire the mechanisms against such tampering – as was the case with the Handymen – Fink was too intent on refilling his coffers as quickly as possible to bother with the product recall such modifications would require. Naturally, the Vox Populi were able to exploit this vulnerability once they were able to obtain sufficient stocks of Possession, gradually using it to fuel their rise to power.

Towards the end, as Comstock and his lieutenants retreated to the safety of their gilded strongholds and the Vox Populi seized control of the streets they'd abandoned, Possession found a new and terrible use among the more hedonistic revolutionaries. By this stage, the idealism of the once-laudable Vox had been overwhelmed by their lust for revenge, and those Founders left behind in Emporia were the perfect scapegoats: those of them not simply killed on sight or tortured to death behind closed doors were herded into makeshift arenas: there, the terrified citizens were Possessed and forced to fight – or worse – for the amusement of the angry mob, every murder, degradation and suicide greeted with another peal of hysterical laughter – the violence and insanity at the heart of Columbia laid bare at last through the power of this most unique Vigor.

* * *

Like many inventions in Columbia's history, Possession's more militant users gradually formed an elite unit of empowered warriors and fanatics; unlike the Firemen and the Crows, however, the Possession-wielding Preachers of the Way were not widespread across all of Columbia's iterations, and most of my variants across the possibility space never encountered them at all. Generally speaking, these individuals only appeared in timelines where the dogma of the Founders took a turn for the violent, sometimes in response to the Vox gaining the upper hand earlier than before, sometimes as a result of a drastic spike in Comstock's religious mania.

They also made a brief appearance in the mainstream timelines during the reign of the Lamb, especially once my future self developed a taste for brainwashing techniques; in the end, however, these variants fell into obsolescence as my future counterpart lost interest in short-term control and had her researchers study means of permanent reconditioning. In the end, the mainstream Preachers were replaced by the Boys of Silence and their quiescent hordes of inmates, the threat of mental obliteration a thousand times more effective in controlling the citizenry than Possession's blunt puppetry, the virtual invincibility of the Boys of Silence trumping even the vistas of control demonstrated by the Preachers. In other, bloodier Columbias, however, the Preachers' heyday never ended.

The Preachers of the Way were unusual, even by Columbian standards. In contrast with the more commonplace elites, they weren't penitent criminals or civilian extremists in cooperation with the police, but militarized members of the city's clergy. With violent uprisings occurring throughout the city on a daily basis in these bloodier timelines, Comstock needed operatives who could act swiftly ad independently in times of crisis and serve as propaganda tools in times of peace – however brief they were; thus, priests were selected for this role, partly due to their experience with directing and addressing crowds but mostly due to the fact that they could be positioned throughout the city without drawing the kind of attention that military officers would usually attract.

Over the course of the recruitment period, Comstock was able to find perhaps a hundred clergymen brave enough to serve him on the battlefield and pious enough to partake of the "divine gift"; however, as the newly-empowered Preachers arrived on the battlefield, their ranks swelled with acolytes inspired by their victories against the Vox Populi, to the point that the simple church he'd given them simply couldn't contain the multitude. Soon, the Founders were forced to provide them with an entire cathedral built into the cellars of Comstock House; there, in chambers that would have dwarfed the Sistine Chapel, the newest and most unpleasant of all the city's brotherhoods went about their business under the guidance of their master, the Voice of the Prophet, indulging their addictions and ushering in even more recruits. By the end of Columbia's presence in the possibility space, timelines such as these had almost a thousand Preachers at work throughout the city.

These ascended priests were easily recognized by the lavish vestments and ostentatious pro-Founder iconography they wore, including ceremonial swords, golden keys, scrolls inscribed with pre-approved sermons, and amulets bearing Comstock's image. Like the Order of the Raven, they regarded their chosen Vigor with considerable reverence, often imbuing themselves with their first dose of Possession through elaborate baptismal rites, accepting all subsequent doses only from chalices and other sanctified vessels. Continuous exposure to the empowering serum turned their eyes luminous green and wreathed their hands in billowing emerald flames; the apparitions associated with Possession usage grew steadily larger, often hovering behind the Preachers for hours on end and sometimes even shaping themselves into halos, auras and other saintlike regalia. As these interdimensional manifestations became more powerful, gravity loosened its grip on the Preachers as the spectral power flowed through them: quite a few of these militant chaplains took to walking on water in order to impress the faithful, while others simply levitated high above the battlefield in pursuit of their targets.

Unknown to all but a select few, Possession users became more and more manipulative and psychopathic as time went on, their empathy for others gradually eroding as the Tear-impregnated fluid altered the structure of their brain: within a matter of weeks after their first dose, even the gentlest of the clergy would be willing to turn brother against brother for their own twisted amusement, willing to sacrifice those they'd once loved for the sake of their grotesque ambitions. Even the most devout faiths withered away in the face of the user's compulsive need to control and exploit – a lack of conscience that served them all-too-well in combat. Indeed, the only reason why the Preachers never turned their attention to unseating Comstock was out of fear – fear that he and Fink would be able to deprive them of the Vigor they were now addicted to; for similar reasons, none of the Preachers ever joined the Vox Populi, not even when Comstock's hypocrisies were laid bare and Fitzroy overwhelmed the factories. After all, Comstock House's Siphon was the only reliable source of Vigors left to them.

On the rare occasions that Booker and I encountered the Preachers in the field, things usually ended very badly: whole crowds of innocent civilians devolved into angry mobs at the simplest word of command from just one of the Vigor-crazed demagogues. Even the self-destructive zeal of the Founders' military and the vengeful ferocity of the Vox Populi's later warriors paled in comparison to the Possession-induced insanity commanded by the Preachers: in these unfortunate timelines, I witnessed a horde of filing clerks bring down a Vox Handyman by sheer force of numbers, observed senior citizens extinguish a house fire under the weight of their own corpses, saw children as young as five years old charging our flanks with unpinned grenades in their hands; once, I saw an entire family drink flasks of sulphuric acid, just to show their "devotion" to the Preacher that had bewitched them.

The masters of these mind-controlled fanatics made no distinction between Founders and Vox, combatant or civilian; either one was fair game to the twisted clergy. Indeed, Preachers _enjoyed_ seizing control of civilians, especially if they were unwilling: in one particularly grisly encounter, I heard several of them chuckling over the sheer terror that "those Irish marionettes" felt while under the influence of Possession, and "all the fuss they made over their little lost brats"; as it turned out, a common practice among Preaches targeting Vox-aligned neighbourhoods was to target the wandering children first, forcing the adults to leave their fortified homes and attempt a rescue – only to end up getting enthralled as well. Even while off-duty, these priests would often be seen toying with the minds of their congregations for hours on end, forcing them to perform in elaborate dramas and epics for little more than brief diversion. And unfortunately, killing one of these demented evangelists usually wasn't enough to end his dominion over the minds of his congregation: more often than not, a mortally-wounded Preacher would simply issue a suicide command to his flock out of sheer spite, usually while laughing triumphantly at the dismayed expression on the faces of his enemies.

In those particular timelines, Booker and I usually attempted to mount an attack on the Preacher's base of operations following our journey through Emporia, hoping that we'd be able to find a means of ascending into Comstock House. At the time, we'd believed that the place would be almost empty of Preachers thanks to the ongoing Vox revolution; unfortunately, we were wrong: nine times out of ten, our attempted infiltration ended with Booker being Possessed and forced to hand me over to Comstock. On one particularly unfortunate iteration in which Comstock finally lost control of the Preachers, the Voice of the Prophet decided to cement their rebellion by forcing Booker to break my neck.

Few things are as unpleasant as having to hear your own spine snap in two, but even that paled in comparison to the rare occasions in more loyalist timelines, when Preachers decided to execute the False Shepard before handing me over. Of course, the Voice of the Prophet had no interest in sullying his hands, nor did any of his followers.

They made _me_ do it.

Nine times out of ten, they were quick enough to stop me from killing myself.

On the tenth instance, they just let it happen.

* * *

As with most of the Vigors, the dimension from which the power of Possession was drawn remained a mystery to all but an extremely select few: only the Luteces managed to get a halfway decent look at where the Tears led, and they took its secrets to the grave – and beyond. Even the Preachers of the Way didn't have much interest in how ordinary tapwater was transmuted into their divine elixir, but I doubt that the knowledge would have stopped them drinking it.

In reality, the power was not a natural phenomenon in the world it was drawn from, nor was it a natural ability of one of its inhabitants: the power of Possession was, in fact, _one of the inhabitants_.

The apparition seen manifesting around those wielded the Vigor was not merely a random quirk of dimensional physics interacting with human tissues, nor was it a phantom of the wielder's imagination transmitted into semi-corporeal reality, but a living creature capable of travelling through even the microscopic Tears earthed within the Vigor fluid. This being never volunteered her true name, nor did the Luteces have any opportunity to ask it; in the end, they were forced to make do with a codename drawn from Robert's boyhood fascination from Greek mythology: Hecate, after the goddess of magic and entranceways.

During our long talks in the aftermath of Columbia's destruction, back in the days when I was still trying to find some means of living with myself, the Luteces told me of the world they had connected to in their formulation of their last Vigor, a place they called the Bleak Expanse: it was among the least earthly of the dimensions they'd reached out to, a gloomy and almost colourless realm dominated by opaque clouds of gas and withered, half-dead stars. No vegetation was visible in any of the terrains accessed, nor was there any solid ground, only dense banks of vapour as far as the eye could see. And in these rolling gas clouds, the inhabitants of this world endlessly flitted to and fro – and still do, to the best of my knowledge.

From what little the Luteces could see, these wraith-like beings were sentient enough to have developed a civilization of their own, though it was largely clan-based and often plunged into long periods of warfare in disputes over territory and ownership. They even possessed music, capable of producing a wide variety of captivating melodies that echoed endlessly across the rippling oceans of vapour; unfortunately, while Robert was recording one of these haunting arias for posterity, Hecate happened upon the Tear he had opened. The Luteces were quick to shut down their machinery and close the portal, but then the observer knew what to look for: when Possession was inadvertently created, Hecate attempted to enter through the microscopic Tears grounded in the water, only to be stymied by the grounding process – H2O proving too diffusive a medium to transmit herself through. But as test subjects started actually drinking the Vigor, Hecate found herself able to gain traction in our reality through the bodies of Possession wielders.

Information on Hecate herself is scarce, though the brief glimpses of her home life were enough to make the Luteces uncomfortable about her forays into our reality: the chieftain of the largest and the strongest of all the clans, she had made a name for herself as a demigoddess – a potency achieved by consuming the energies of her fallen enemies. With most of her people too terrified to oppose her for the time being, she looked upon the Tears into our end of the multiverse as a new source of amusement. Up until the day when she found herself in Columbia, Hecate had no idea that she possessed the ability to warp human minds and technology at will, and the discovery of a world that responded so readily to her touch fascinated her – just as the sight of organic bodies wracked with pain thrilled her. Thus, she consented to granting Possession wielders her services for the carnage it presented, dividing herself between thousands of portals so she could take in all the atrocities Columbia could display.

At first, users could only direct Hecate towards targets in much the same way that a rider would direct a horse; however, as time went on, users gained finer control over Possession, until eventually they ceased to command the ghostly figure haunting them and simply focused the powers of their own mind – or so they thought. In reality, the differences between weapon and wielder had become negligible, and the will of the individual had given way to a twisted symbiosis: at first simply altering the structure of their brains to make them think more like her, Hecate then began to form permanent conduits in their bodies, allowing them to use her powers directly even as it allowed her to inhabit their bodies on a more intimate basis. Needless to say, the Preachers of the Way were her vessels in our end of the probability space, at once serving their own interests and obeying her commands without even realizing it.

Fortunately, Hecate's ambitions were limited to short-term carnage, even in iterations of Columbia where she held secretly held sway over the entire city. Had Columbia ever succeeded in destroying the Sodom Below or bringing God's wrath to the other worlds of the multiverse, I've no doubt Hecate would have been happy enough to lend a hand to the Lamb's cause if it meant further chaos, even if the city were to one day attack her own dimension. Needless to say, the Luteces and I ultimately played our part in nipping this apocalypse in the bud; indeed, Hecate ended up playing an indirect role in our victory – likely never knowing who or what she was aiding.

Columbia Raffle and Fair did not offer free samples of Possession: even Fink wasn't deluded enough to think that a machine-controlling Vigor would not be immediately misused by the revellers, especially with tickets to the Raffle sold out and so many people eager to get in. However, the Luteces had ways around such restrictions, and even the pious citizens of Columbia weren't above accepting the occasional bribe: stealing a bottle of Possession from one of Fink's factories, they paid a salesgirl a hundred silver eagles to loiter outside the Possession exhibit and pretend to operate the film projector until Booker Dewitt arrived, whereupon she would take up her basket of "free samples" and provide him with his very first Vigor.

As I understand it, the glowing vaporous figure that Booker saw upon drinking the Vigor was Hecate's true form.

To date, I still don't know if Hecate ever realized what the Luteces were planning, or if she ever attempted to help or hinder their plans directly; likewise, I've no idea if she resents the Luteces and I for ending her fun.

All I know is that she's still out there.

Waiting.

* * *

A/N: _Up next, Devil's Kiss!_


	3. Devil's Kiss

A/N: And we're back! Very glad to have some reviews; detailed critiques and criticisms are always welcome - thanks everyone!

* * *

 _Light the way!_

Devil's Kiss was notoriously unpopular among Columbia's civilian populace, partly due to Fink's hopelessly inept marketing and product design, but mostly due to the devastating array of side-effects inherent in its usage. By nature, all Fink MFG-branded Vigors had their fair share of unpleasant symptoms, but those of Devil's Kiss were by far the most extreme and the most immediate: few citizens wanted to try another drop of "The Kiss" after seeing their flesh melt off their bones, even if their wounds vanished in a matter of seconds; the spectral burns continuously appearing and disappearing on their hands only worsened impressions further. Indeed, it became one of the first Vigors to receive public censure for being sold on the open market, and in even more conservative iterations of Columbia, it was the first to be pulled from the shelves.

This proved to be something of a trend for the product, as Devil's Kiss became quite famous for being a record-setter at Fink MFG: it was the first Vigor to be marketed for home defence, the first to be applied for use in the punishment of criminals, the first to be sold to Columbia's military, and the first to be properly formulated by the Lutece twins (who initially labelled it "Pyrogenesis"). In fact, from what Rosalind tells me, it was even derived from the first examples of Tear phenomena to appear in Monument Island's plumbing.

Needless to say, it was a persistent menace throughout my early days in the tower: while I was being settled in upstairs, fire erupted from the downstairs pipes, magma rained down on unsuspecting hands, and bathroom fixtures melted into useless slag. Quite a few lab assistants were killed or maimed as a result before the Luteces were finally able to figure out the problem and insulate the Tower's conduits against accidental releases; in the end, few people outside the lab cared, apart from the families of the deceased – who naturally received no compensation for their loss. As if to add insult to injury, these casualties were later used as evidence for Fink's sale of the newly-retitled Devil's Kiss to Comstock's army and the foundation for an entire franchise.

From the very beginning, the destructive potential of Devil's Kiss was obvious to the military: even in timelines where Vigors only attained marginal success in the army, the "flame tonic" was always utilized at least in some respect. Unlike Possession, usage of Devil's Kiss was commonly assigned to the lowest ranks, as nobody wanted to actually drink the stuff if they had a choice: quite apart from the pain and terror usually experienced by first-time imbibers, even the most casual uses of the Vigor were usually traumatic in the extreme; having seen – and smelled – the flesh on Booker's hands burning down to the bones, I already know that it was an unpleasant power to witness in action. To actually have to experience the same agonizing pain with every single use of the Vigor would have been _indescribable_ , even before the long-term side-effects became apparent – something that Booker fortunately never had to deal with, thanks to his previous exposure to the Lutece gateway. Indeed, the symptoms were so horrific that eventually Comstock's generals chose to institute the usage of Devil's Kiss as an official punishment among the ranks, with any offence too minor to be met with imprisonment or execution being instead rewarded with a month of Vigor duties – a practise that eventually led to the rise of the infamous Firemen.

Despite the pain suffered by these unfortunate soldiers, the Vigor proved effective not only as a conventional weapon, but as an instrument of terror: upon discovering a Vox Populi base hidden within a civilian building, a popular tactic among the army was to immolate the building from the ground out, publically eliminating both the dissidents and the citizens who'd supported them. Such methods were especially valued once the Vox moved from sabotaging freight transit to bombing government buildings – particularly in timelines when Comstock went so far as to conduct a full-scale purge of Finkton in an attempt to destroy them once and for all. By then, of course, the Vigor had moved out of the hands of the common soldiery and into the hands of the Firemen – and any moral concerns of the users had vanished, along with their sanity.

Long before then, however, Devil's Kiss had travelled from the exclusive domain of the military to mainstream stores throughout Columbia. As it was the first Vigor to be marketed for civilian consumers, Fink devoted a spectacular advertising campaign to spreading the word of its existence across Columbia, drawing particular attention to the verbal endorsement provided by Comstock himself. However, as was often the case with Fink's marketing strategies, it didn't quite mesh with the city's defining ideology: the name alone raised eyebrows among Columbia's upper crust, and when the bottle design reached the public, several "moral crusaders" lodged official complaints with Fink MFG – both in regards to the nudity and the devil motif. The cackling demon mascots didn't help much either. Some outraged citizens even went so far as to petition Comstock himself for a full product recall.

In the majority of timelines, nothing came of it: as it happened, the Prophet couldn't have cared less about immoral advertising techniques, public opinion, or even if Devil's Kiss mixed with the philosophy he'd established; all he cared about was ensuring the ultimate success of Columbia across the multiverse, and the Vigors – like so many of Jeremiah Fink's products – were a means to that end. So, his endorsement continued, despite the clamouring of the Committee For Common Decency, and in most of Columbia's iterations, the devils of Fink advertising were gradually accepted – and eventually incorporated into the annual raffle and fair.

Unfortunately, the immediate side-effects immediately began driving down potential customers, as did the Vigor's comparatively limited utility: unlike Rapture's Incinerate! Devil's Kiss had always been most useful as a weapon, and attempts at applying it to everyday utility were not especially successful. Attempts to use it as a cigarette lighter usually ended with beards, hair and sometimes entire faces being ignited; using it to light candles could only end in property damage, and even the relatively innocuous usage as a torch simply wasn't worth the pain. After a highly critical letter-writing campaign from the public, Fink attempted to assuage the backlash by suggesting that the Vigor was best used for home defence – a fact quickly proved incorrect. While there was a small minority of paranoid citizens anxious for any advantage against the growing threat of the Vox Populi, even the most cautious users ended up burning down the very homes they were trying to defend. In the end, the only civilians who had good cause to use it without incinerating everything they owned were self-repressed paranoiacs who used Devil's Kiss as a particularly destructive form of liquid courage and modern-day flagellants who used it as a means of spiritual purification. And then, as was so often the case, the long-term side-effects became apparent – quite terrifyingly so.

With every drink of a Vigor, Tear activity in the user's body became more consistent and more pronounced, and though this allowed the wielders to utilize the powers they gained for longer periods of time, it also made the side-effects permanent. Devil's Kiss was no exception: with every drink of Vigor, the pyrogenic effect slowly spread from the hands to the rest of the body, until long-term users found themselves constantly burning from the inside out, condemned to spend their lives in excruciating pain but unable to die as long as the Tears continued to fluctuate. For good measure, the pyrogenesis was so widespread and so potent by that stage, most users had no choice but to continue their addiction for the simple fact that stopping might very well kill them instantly. Several of my selves witnessed civilian Vigor-Junkies suffering this very fate during the Vox Populi uprising: driven to terminal usage by fear and desperation, many found themselves unable to find sufficient stocks of Devil's Kiss to supply their addiction, often incinerating themselves in a matter of seconds as their own flames consumed them – or worse still, condemned to a slow, lingering death from the fifth-degree burns their powers had inflicted upon themselves.

Needless to say, Fink did his best to disguise these symptoms as soon as they were brought to his attention: despite his monumental arrogance and delusional faith in his own abilities, even he realized that his customer base would implode at the sight of some of the more extreme Vigor-junkies. With access to sales records from just about every Vigor retailer in Columbia, he was able to track down habitual users of Devil's Kiss (rare as they were) and keep them monitored as often as possible; as soon as they began manifesting continuous pyrogenesis, he had them removed from the public eye as quickly and quietly as possible, once again with Comstock's blessing.

Most of these ex-consumers ended up spending the rest of their lives as test subjects in Fink MFG's laboratories, their addictions fed with regular doses of concentrated Devil's Kiss, constantly experimented on in increasingly twisted attempts to discover the true potential of the Vigor; indeed, those who remained in the labs were exposed to more Devil's Kiss than even their compatriots among the Firemen – and mutated even further. Despite the danger, Fink did not consider disposing of the small army he'd allowed to accumulate in his laboratories. Indeed, he seemed actively amused by the concept, even treating them as pets on his more delirious days, often visiting his "Chained Devils" in the hopes of recruiting them for gladiatorial games at the Good-Time Club, bestowing upon them a wide variety of demeaning stage names for them to brawl under – Dragon, Flambé, Toasty, Barbecue, and Vesuvius, to name but a few.

Similarly, he did not remove the Vigor from the civilian market in spite of the threat it posed to his customers, but merely continued monitoring its effects in recognized users… and when the time came for a public demonstration of Devil's Kiss, he kept his performers masked in the garb of the Devil Mascots to hide their deformities – and heavily insulated with flame-retardant gel to avoid explosions.

When the Vox finally seized control of the factories, Devil's Kiss became a popular weapon among the angry mobs, many of whom were eager to throw their lives away in pursuit of revenge against the Founders. Indeed, much of the fires that were lit across Columbia could be attributed to this particular Vigor – either from first-time users or defecting Firemen. Worse still, as more and more of Fink MFG's powerbase fell into Vox Populi hands, the Chained Devils incarcerated at the company labs broke out and went on a rampage through the city, reducing Columbia's most prosperous districts to blackened husks and leaving Soldier's Field a blazing inferno visible for miles around. One by one, they converged on Emporia, determined to take their revenge on Comstock along with the rest of the Vox – and as bad luck would have it, Booker and I happened to meet a few of them.

The newest of these living infernos looked almost human except for their scars. Indeed, some of them, apparently gripped by a desperate need to ape normalcy, attempted to hide their burns under heavy clothing: I remember seeing one such character striding through the ruins of Emporia in a gentleman's inverness coat and top hat, his face wrapped in a scarf; the only thing that gave him away were his blazing eyes, barely hidden by his shaded spectacles. Ultimately, these individuals were in the minority, and most of the young Devils preferred to roam completely naked, every inch of scar tissue and deformity on display: hairless from head to toe, their glowing eyes smouldering in their sockets, arms ablaze past the elbows, fingers little more than blackened stumps, their skin a ghastly patchwork of burns, blisters and charred flesh. Here and there, gaping fissures and craters pockmarked their bodies, each one aglow from the blazing heat that was slowly consuming them from the inside. And of course, all of them were preceded by the distinctive smell of roasting meat.

But even these horrors were nothing compared to their elders, the most powerful of all the Chained Devils – if not the most powerful Vigor-Junkies in all of Columbia: little more than skeletons wreathed in flame, only constant fluctuating Tear activity kept them from simply disintegrating in the inferno that had all but devoured them. Led by the oldest of them all, a mass of living fire known only Vesuvius, they gladly joined the likes of the Handymen in wreaking indiscriminate havoc on the Founders – and anyone else who dared challenge them. More often than not, these walking conflagrations were too destructive to tackle alone, the heat of their presence easily melting bullets in mid-flight: even Booker's mastery of Undertow wasn't enough to extinguish their flame. In these rare and especially disastrous iterations of Columbia, I often made use of my powers to kill directly, either smothering them in oxygen-strangling gasses from far-flung realities or drowning them in torrents of water from distant oceans.

Vesuvius was the last of them to die, falling in battle not long after my escape from Comstock House: Booker and I fought some of the most challenging battles of our lives against him, duelling him with every weapon in our arsenal and every Tear I could possibly conjure – but even that wasn't enough. Even blanketed in enough carbon dioxide to extinguish most of Emporia, even after being half-crushed beneath the waters of the North Atlantic, Vesuvius fought on, dispersing the gas and evaporating the water. In the end, I pushed my powers to their very limits, and opened a far-reaching Tear just long enough to launch him through it – leaving him stranded twenty-two thousand miles above the Earth. There in the silent void between stars, the agony of Vesuvius came to an end at long last, his inferno quenched once and for all in the airless vacuum of space.

* * *

Next to the Zealots of the Lady, the Firemen were the most common of all Vigor specialists, appearing in every single timeline and iteration of Columbia with little in the way of variation. Though they began in the military, they didn't remain there for long: once it became clear that the only way that their men could be motivated to use it would be through punishment, Comstock's generals quickly realized they'd have to find a more effective supply of recruits if they wanted to maintain their heavy infantry on a consistent basis. Fortunately, a city as draconian as Columbia never lacked for criminals, and the generals had no need to look any further than the prisons for their newest source of personnel.

As the mass-arrests of suspected Vox Populi continued throughout Columbia's iterations, prisons throughout the city soon became hopelessly crowded; even the casualties wreaked upon inmates by neglect, torture and executions didn't thin the population quickly enough for the wardens' tastes. However, once the discipline-induced gap in the ranks was discovered, the generals of Columbia's army were able to address this problem by seeking out certain prisoners who might be open to the idea of attaining redemption. Most of the committed Vox Populi refused agreements such as these, but torture and indoctrination was successful in gathering in a number of tormented souls desperate the forgiveness of their Prophet; and while the middle-class sympathizers occasionally proved more resilient than expected, they all too often succumbed to the same torturous overtures – as did the murderers, burglars, pickpockets and the unfortunates who'd been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Now convinced that they would be redeemed in the eyes of God if they cooperated, these convicts were taken to a secret laboratory hidden deep within Finkon and subjected to a suitably _Vigorous_ preparation by their newly-assigned handlers: forcefed Devil's Kiss via automated pumps, they were accelerated through their mutation as swiftly as their deteriorating bodies could handle it, usually over the course of ten hours. Because of the Vigor's intensity, deaths by overdose were highly probable, and induction procedures such as these often ended with at least one of the recruits disintegrating before the Tear activity in their bodies could reach acceptable levels.

In one notable variation from our journey, one of my selves was unfortunate enough to visit this particular laboratory, and it still rates as one of the most horrific sights I witnessed in all of Columbia, outdone only by the Handyman augmentation theatre and the workshops of Comstock House during the reign of the Lamb. In my nightmares, I can still see the induction gallery and all its horrors time and again: a barren concrete hall divided into fireproof stalls reminiscent of a stable, the walls blackened with scorch marks, the floor putrid with dried blood, melted flesh, fresh human waste and the distinctive garnet-coloured puddles of Devil's Kiss. I remember the smell, a cascade of disgusting aromas overpowering the senses, each one more repulsive than the last – from the expected scent of burnt hair and burnt meat to the gut-clenching smell of boiling excrement.

Most of all, I remember the recruits: kneeling on the floor, their feet chained down and their hands cuffed behind them, all twenty-five of them were naked, allowing an unhindered view of their horrific transformations; from the industrial pump above each stall, thick tubes had been forced into the recruits' open mouths and fastened in place through restraining masks, and with every churn of the machine, more Vigor was pumped into them. With every mouthful they were forced to swallow, the recruits could only whimper in pain as their flesh smouldered and charred under the onslaught – for their throats were too scalded to scream. Once or twice, I tried to set them free, to unlock their restraints and prize their masks off – to no avail: when I tried to help them stand, they always pushed me away. "Leave me be," they would say. "Father Comstock has opened the gates of Heaven to us and I will not stray from the path again."

Once the induction was finished, the newly-forged Firemen were led from their stalls and outfitted with heavy suits of armour, caging them inside highly-conductive metallic shells more reminiscent of iron maidens than conventional platemail: from then on, they would see the world only through the tiny shielded grille in their helmets and feed only on the heavy reservoir of Vigor contained in the tanks they carried. When not in battle, they were kept in cold storage, sedated with Possession and heavily insulated to prevent unscheduled explosions – just in case their indoctrination happened to falter. When the time came for them to be deployed in the field, they were hurriedly stripped of their insulation, provided with two suitably expendable handlers and sent out by gunship to the scene of the crime: if on official demolition duties, they remained under the watchful eyes of their handlers; but in the event of rampant hostiles – or the unexpected appearance of Booker DeWitt – the Firemen were given free reign over the battlefield and Comstock's blessing to commit as much collateral damage as possible if it meant the death of the target. Needless to say, even their allies gave them a wide berth in combat, and the citizens of Columbia soon learned to fear the distinctive heatwave that heralded a Fireman's arrival: at times, the prospect of being in the same vicinity as "the Copper Kettles" was enough to send entire districts scurrying for cover.

Of all the Vigor specialists across the Possibility Space, the Firemen suffered the worst: already in constant pain from the continuous influx of Devil's Kiss, their armour only amplified the heat of pyrogenesis even further, searing their skin whenever it touched metal. Alone inside their shells, denied the luxuries of fresh air, food and tactile sensation, forbidden from contact with their former friends and family, even barred from interacting with other Firemen, most of them were barely sane by the end of their lives. And yet, their indoctrination remained constant and almost unbreakable: no matter how greatly they suffered, they never abandoned their search for redemption, vowing to fight to the last agonized breath in their increasingly deteriorated bodies: wading into hails of gunfire with no concern for their own safety, they set entire streets ablaze in their righteous fury, incinerating friend and foe alike in pursuit of salvation. And when their armour was punctured and the last atom of their strength spent, they channelled their powers into one final self-combusting blast, ending their lives in "purifying conflagration."

Well, that was the intended response, at any rate.

Needless to say, indoctrination became difficult to maintain as the Vox Populi began gaining ground on the Founders and Comstock's claims of prophecy began to collapse: while several Firemen remained loyal to the Founders despite the loss of face (and faith), the overwhelming majority of them joined the Vox Populi, abandoning all thought of redemption in pursuit of blind unrelenting vengeance. Much like the Chained Devils, the Copper Kettles spent their last tortuous days seeking revenge upon the Founders; however, unlike the Vigor Junkies, who could not be satisfied with anything less than blood and pain, these converted sought to destroy Comstock's legacy for all time. When not being deployed against Booker, the Vox Firemen pillaged the churches and libraries of Columbia for relics to incinerate, either gathering the sacred treasures into massive bonfires or simply destroying the entire building from the ground up. Others simply marched from street to street, burning entire districts to the ground, intending for new settlements to be built on the ashes of the Founders' mansions.

But the most ambitious of all Firemen delved into the foundations of Columbia itself, slowly destroying the machinery that kept the city running: the security shielding that defended the perimeter from outside attack, the thermal barriers keeping the freezing temperature at bay, the atmospheric bubbles that prevented the citizenry from experiencing the devastating effects of Columbia's altitude, even the Lutece field generators keeping the city from plummeting to the ground. Having already given up any idea of redemption, these nihilistic saboteurs had also abandoned all hope of seeing the city in the hands of the Vox Populi: by then, all they wanted was to see Columbia obliterated for all time.

I often wondered how these tortured souls would have reacted had they realized what the Luteces and I were planning. Would they have insisted on their own method of searing Columbia from the timestream, or would they have made an alliance? To this day, I can only imagine: the multiverse has shown me some incredible things, especially as my travels have led me further away from the constants of each possible reality and into the depths of the variables, but it's never given me a doorway into the thoughts of others.

Perhaps I could have made an alliance with the Firemen; in hindsight, we were more alike than I could have possibly imagined.

* * *

All things considered, the side-effects of Devil's Kiss wouldn't have surprised anyone had they known where its powers had been harnessed from. Once the Luteces had isolated the Tears that had created the pyrogenic effects, they were able to access the dimension these portals led to – and immediately regretted it: the doorway they had created now opened on a world of active volcanoes and searing heat, an inhospitable wasteland broken only by vast oceans of molten lava and vast clouds of toxic gas. Rosalind called this place Reality 005-Red, but Robert dubbed it "Muspelheim," after the mythical Norse realm of fire.

Once they had hastily reinforced the thermal shields around their machinery and outfitted their lab assistants with gas masks, they began surveying this new world in detail: soon, they noticed the usual storm activity over the lava fields, and how the clouds would literally rain fireballs upon the already-ravaged landscape. It was here that the microscopic Tears of Devil's Kiss had emerged, in molten lava and storms of fire; those who drank the Vigor didn't gain pyrokinesis or anything remotely like Rapture's Incinerate!, but rather the ability to channel the dimension's firestorms and magma – not to mention the ability to _survive_ the lethal temperatures they were channelling.

Barren of life, Muspelheim offered little to interest the Luteces other than the phenomena on display: from what little they could tell, the lava fields went on for thousands of miles, perhaps even occupying the surface of the entire planet – and perhaps even further than that, if the physics of this world stretched as far beyond the realm of dimensional constants as current theories suggest. Eventually, the Luteces grew bored with exploring the physical laws that governed this desolate place, and moved on to examining the other worlds they had discovered through the Vigors, and eventually to testing the Vigors themselves.

Unfortunately, once they began human trials, they eventually found – to their horror – that their Pyrogenesis concoction could be more unstable than any other Vigor on record: as with most Vigors, continuous exposure caused the Tear activity within the body of the user to escalate, until users became permanently-open gateways to other dimensions; however, with Devil's Kiss, the Tears ran the risk of expanding even wider than that even in the case of first-time users, especially in the event that the Vigor's chemical composition malfunctioned. In an astronomical case of bad luck, one experimental trial was interrupted when a poorly-formulated batch of Devil's Kiss resulted in the unfortunate test subject being ripped open from the inside by a rampant Tear large enough to encompass most of the lab; suddenly faced with an open doorway to Muspelheim, the Lutece twins and their research assistants would have been killed either by the heat, pyroclastic flows or toxic gasses, and Monument Island might very well have been destroyed – had their other major test subject not intervened.

At the time, I was fast asleep in the tower far above them, but even then I had sufficient strength to open a Tear in my dreams, and at that stage I also found it easier to open them subconsciously. Without even waking up, I was able to shut the Tear and save the Luteces – a fact that they were eventually able to thank me for once Columbia was finally wiped from existence. Until then, however, the twins busied themselves with discovering the precise nature of the fault, and then carefully scaling back their research on Devil's Kiss. In their notes, they recommended a slow and cautious exposure process over the course of the Vigor's formulation, lest catastrophic instabilities form in the liquid.

Unfortunately, when Fink inherited their patents, it wasn't long before he started ignoring their advice: with Devil's Kiss required in bulk for the creation of Firemen and bottle after bottle acquired for the civilian franchise, what little caution the man possessed was quickly lost in the gluttonous pursuit of profit. Few consignments proved as badly-formulated as the Luteces' first batch, and the rampant Tears unleashed usually vanished in a matter of seconds, but the results were still horrific: a Fireman exploded ahead of schedule, a score of citizens died from exposure to volcanic gasses, or a dozen houses abruptly burst into flame. However, in more chaotic timelines, the results got worse, until one Vox-dominated iteration of Columbia played host to a massive stable portal to Muspelheim, transforming most of Battleship Bay into hell on earth – an impression only worsened when the Chained Devils arrived on the scene.

In one far-flung iteration of Columbia, I recall leaving the city aboard the _Hand Of The Prophet_ with the Vox fleet in hot pursuit, in much the same way as I had in other successful timelines… but this time, the Vox Populi attack was disrupted by a massive explosion as the entire city vanished in a searing ball of flame – the result of one cataclysmically-botched consignment of Devil's Kiss brewed just before the Vox revolution had begun. Having been found at the factory and immediately discarded as a dangerous product by sharp-eyed inspectors, it had remained in the disposal yard for several days before civilian Vigor-Junkies stole the lot – and then promptly got into a fight with another band of junkies set on claiming the batch for themselves. Several dozen doses of unstable Devil's Kiss, a gang of crazed citizens desperate to protect their homes, a platoon of Vox Firemen running out of fuel in their tanks, two Chained Devils hell-bent on destroying anything in sight, an entire factory full of unattended Vigors, and just enough portals opening at once were all that was needed to set off a chain reaction. Comstock House, Emporia, Finkton, Soldier's Field, Battleship Bay, and the Comstock Centre were annihilated in a firestorm encompassing most of the city. All that survived was Monument Island – and Songbird made short work of that.

In this timeline, Comstock's paradise drowned in flame above the mountains of man.

* * *

A/N: _Up next, Murder of Crows!_


	4. Murder of Crows

A/N: Aaaaand latest chapter! There's a massive shout-out to the Bioshock Infinite demo trailers in this chapter, and an expansion on how the story could have emerged (in my demented perspective); hope you enjoy it.

Guest: I know that there's more than one universe where Comstock existed... because it's specifically stated in the game, hence why Booker and Elizabeth have to erase Comstock from the Possibility Space. Because if they don't, Columbia will Drown In Flame The Mountains Of Man, and then move onto conquering the rest of the multiverse. And no, the Vigors are not derived from Tears: in canon, they are derived from ADAM. The fact that they were produced through a collaboration between Suchong and Fink conducted via a Tear does not make them literally derived from Tears. The theory I liked so much stated that the Vigors were derived **_from Elizabeth's powers._** Incidentally, did you have any opinions about the actual story you'd like to convey? Just asking.

Jane St Valentine: Bit confused here. Are you annoyed because I bashed Burial At Sea, or because of the rant itself? If it's the latter, I specifically stated you could skip the intro if you weren't interested; if it's the former and you're a fan of Burial At Sea... well, this was your big opportunity to present your opinions. Why leave it unexploited? And yes, I've heard the Voxophone: I've played the game and found just about all of the audio diaries - and even if I happen to forget how it goes, I have access to the Internet. And no, this doesn't suffice: there's a difference between a Voxophone that states that Fink was plagiarizing stuff from another reality without stating the biologist's identity, the precise dimension, or what Fink was taking, and a profoundly lazy DLC that says IT ALL CAME FROM RAPTURE. NEVERMIND WHAT WE SAID ABOUT RAPTURE NOT BEING THE BEGINNING AND THE END OF THE FRANCHISE, BECAUSE NOW IT IS.

And here we go: read, review, and enjoy. Also, if you like Burial At Sea, please feel free to provide me with your chapter and verse.

Disclaimer: Bioshock is not mine. Burial At Sea is not mine, thank god. Also, there is a metric ton of references towards the end of the chapter; for the sake of space, I can't disclaim ownership of them all specifically, but suffice to say they aren't mine. Also, a one-chapter challenge: see if you can identify the games, films, novels and other forms of media all these references belong to; TEH NERDDOM DEMANDZ IT.

* * *

 _Proven deterrent against hooligans!_

When it comes to Vigors, success stories are far and few between: most were so ill-conceived in their conversion from military hardware to consumer products and so badly marketed to the public that some iterations of Columbia rejected the franchise entirely. In others, public Vigor consumption limped along, barely profitable enough to justify the cost of production, sales kept alive by Jeremiah Fink's mad dream of replicating the near-universal success of Rapture's Plasmids. A rare few concoctions managed to avoid the failures that had plagued the rest of the product line, but few of them ever achieved citywide popularity, not while other Vigors polluted their reputation with misguided advertising campaigns, accounts of agonizing side-effects, and complaints of hopelessly impractical powers.

The one exception to this rule was Murder of Crows. Out of all the Vigors produced by Fink MFG, it was the only one that completely dodged every single failure that befell the rest of the franchise: the marketing was non-controversial, the initial side-effects were unsettling but painless, and the powers gained were among the most useful of all obtained through Fink products; best of all, it even had a loyal customer base – one with the political clout sufficient to keep Murder of Crows in production for as long as they still drew breath. Even in timelines when all other Vigors had been consigned to oblivion by years of consumer resistance, even when its own long-term side-effects were revealed to the public, Murder of Crows remained a permanent fixture of Columbian society, the one success story in a history of embarrassments and follies.

Ironically, it was one of the few Vigors that didn't enjoy immediate success with Columbia's military: it lacked the instant lethality of Devil's Kiss, and unlike Possession, it couldn't easily be used as a propaganda tool. At the time, the true potential of Murder of Crows was still unknown to the Founders, and with police demanding deadly weapons against the Vox and the Flying Squad demanding results against enemies within and without, it seemed all but useless. There were a few colonels who suggested that the crows would react badly to their new environment, often drawing attention to the fact that horses and other lower animals succumbed to unreasoning panic in Columbia's high altitude – hence why Payton Lane Easter's automated stallions proved so popular; even the hummingbirds that frequented the gardens had to be specially bred for an area so far above their usual comfort zone. Unknown to them, they had little to fear: the crows summoned by the Vigor barely even reacted to the altitude, and could even travel safely outside the atmospheric bubbles (another early indication that they were _not_ ordinary crows).

With none of the Top Brass aware of the Vigor's true potential, Murder of Crows spent its first three months shelved until someone could think of a proper use for it – a difficult prospect, given the negative reputation that was already beginning to surround others of its kind. Eventually, after several weeks of trying and failing to capture fleeing Vox Populi, frustrated commanders took to using Murder of Crows as a last resort, and discovered that it was most effective in keeping their targets suppressed until the rest of the squad could catch up. Later, as more imaginative tacticians took notice, it also gained traction as a means of ensuring that enemy combatants remained pinned down until the gunners could open fire on them. As such, the duty of wielding the Vigor usually went to the snipers and scouts. Some of them, encouraged by the painless initial side-effects, decided to try experimenting on possible uses for their new weapon, and found that it was also useful as an instrument of torture: though they hadn't achieved the power to project crows in lethal numbers, few prisoners could withstand being pecked and savaged by angry birds for very long. Generals took further notice when squad leaders reported that veteran scouts had learned how to spy on their enemies through their crows, retaining a psychic connection to their flocks long after they had ceased directly controlling them.

Eventually, the soldiers who imbibed long enough to master the Vigor discovered the true extent of the power available to them: as Tear activity in their bodies increased, so too did the number of crows they could summon and their ability to direct them, not only allowing users to take lethal measures in combat, but also see through the eyes of hundreds of birds at a time. Eventually, having gained a measure of control over the Tears that infested their bloodstreams, they learned they could exploit this growing instability in order to effectively transmit their physical beings as miniscule fragments carried by the crows they summoned; through this method, they could become almost intangible in battle and even fly between districts, borne aloft by little more than the microscopic Tears at work within their bodies.

Unfortunately, by that stage many of them were beginning to exhibit some of the Vigor's more unpleasant long-term side-effects, ultimately discouraging further experimentation once the Top Brass got wind of things: if channelled against the enemy, homicidal insanity could be tolerated; birdshit-encrusted uniforms could not. In the end, military use of Murder of Crows was discontinued except for a few elite platoons, but by then it had already been authorized for civilian usage – and from there, into the hands of the Zealots.

By contrast with its brief time in the army, Murder of Crows flourished on the civilian market – in no small part due to the fact that Fink decided not to direct the marketing campaign. Though he'd been enthused by its similarities to the Insect Swarm Plasmid, once the initial reports of the Vigor's limited utility were brought to his attention, the great robber baron lost interest in lending his dubious talents to advertising the product; indeed, his diary entries proclaimed that Murder of Crows would easily be forgotten compared to the "guaranteed success" of Devil's Kiss and Possession. So, he assigned the task of promoting and launching it to one of his lesser executives, Percival Marlowe, even claiming that Marlowe himself had developed the Vigor – ultimately intending to make him a scapegoat for the product's "inevitable" failure.

In contrast to Fink's usual grandiose controversies, the long-overlooked executive organized a boring but reasonable campaign based around light-hearted cartoons of the Vigor in action, along with the occasional poster of himself proclaiming his product "proven deterrent against hooligans," and even made the occasional public appearance at fairs and gatherings to promote Murder of Crows in person. Having been worn out by Fink's soul-crushing pomposity, audiences responded well to Marlowe's understated style and humble demeanour, and Murder of Crows was released to record sales. Though customers were unnerved by the talons and feathers they manifested while using it (not to mention unable to account for where all the crows were coming from) the effectiveness of the Vigor for use in home defence was undeniable, not to mention advantageous for citizens who preferred a less-destructive alternative to Devil's Kiss and Bucking Bronco.

Throughout production, Murder of Crows enjoyed its greatest heights of popularity in residential areas, especially when Columbia's youths started getting unruly: despite the Founders' best efforts to enforce traditional values of loyalty and obedience within the younger generations, teenagers still rebelled from time to time, and in the days before the Vox Populi moved from subterfuge to outright revolution, the sheltered upper-classes feared their own children most of all. From Harmony Lane to Patriot's Pavilion, gangs of bored kids acted out in as grand a manner as possible, vandalizing property, stealing aircabs, hitching rides on the skyrail, scrumping in the greenhouses, and generally doing their level best to terrify the wealthy families from which most of them were drawn. In these residential areas, Murder of Crows was put to good use in keeping vandals suppressed without risking property damage – or costly lawsuits, for that matter; police found the Vigor nothing short of hilarious, especially given that most young offenders were incorrigible dandies who couldn't bear having their best clothes ruined by a hail of guano.

Eventually, the vandals faded away, only to be swiftly replaced by career criminals: with many of the city's impoverished citizens desperate for a means of escaping their miserable lifestyles, burglary flourished – quite terminally so in some especially chaotic timelines. Even some of the more affluent citizens of Columbia couldn't resist coveting their neighbours' possessions, especially if they could find a way of justifying their envy ("His parents were quadroons!" "Everyone knows she has Irish blood!" "Probably all sodomites and Vox Populi in there anyway!" "The Feathered Brothers are hoarding riches – they're more Jew than they think!") In such crime waves, those who lived alone were popular targets, and so Murder of Crows found a new client base among hermits, bachelors, spinsters, widowers and other recluses throughout the city.

These isolated citizens were among the first habitual users to appear outside the military: where previous customers only took Murder of Crows as needed, the solitaries took it in order to combat their paranoia – a fear that Fink MFG was all too happy to exploit if it meant making further sales. For good measure, constant use of the Vigor enforced the crows' presence in their new dimension and encouraged them to remain in proximity to the user, sometimes layering their houses in vast numbers, a sight ominous enough to deter most prospective home invaders; unfortunately, they also tended to frighten away guests, only enforcing the solitude of the inhabitants. In these lonely houses, addiction blossomed, and long-term side-effects slowly oozed into physical reality: just as the Tears in their bodies allowed them to summon the crows, aspects of those same birds were dimensionally superimposed onto their physiognomy by the Tears, briefly grafting avian traits onto human bodies. Their eyes turned almost completely black, the sudden change of colour swiftly colonizing the iris, the sclera, and even the blood vessels; their fingernails lengthened into long, hooked talons, and the skin on their hands turned scaly and wrinkled; feathers sprouted at random across the body, sometimes in fine downy patches on the wrists and forearms, sometimes in long vaned feathers on the elbows and shoulders; in some cases, teeth began to fuse together – forming the beginnings of a beak.

At first, these deformities only manifested during the first drink of the Vigor; then only while using the powers it granted; then only when the user was asleep; then at odd moments throughout the day, when the body was at rest and attention drifted; then once every ten hours. With every drink of the Vigor, the time between manifestations grew shorter, and the length of the transformations grew longer: some long-term users were condemned to a permanent state of flux, their bodies flickering wildly as their bodies tried to determine whether they were human or corvid; others became monstrous hybrids of man and bird, glossy black feathers layering their bodies, their shoulders weighed down by tattered, useless wings, their jaws torn away by the long beaks that had sprouted behind them. Even when they attempted to hide their distorted faces, most of them were easily given away by their distinctive speech: in the event that they still possessed working mouths, long-term addicts spoke with echoing, distorted voices accompanied by the shrieking of crows and the sound of flapping wings from no readily discernible source.

The mental effects were no less devastating: as the Murders gained traction in their transplanted reality, users developed an irresistible urge to care for the crows, to be surrounded by them at all times, often spending hours on end vacantly scattering birdseed around them in the hopes of pleasing the ravenous birds. This expanded to leaving entire meals around for them, including but not limited to loaves of bread, baskets of fruit, whole cheeses, even entire platefuls of roast beef; worse still, the users also became increasingly apathetic to the mess that this approach inevitably created. Soon they also because apathetic to necessary household maintenance, then to social interaction with anyone not already exposed to the Vigor, then to basic human behaviour: just as their bodies adopted avian characteristics, so too did their minds take a turn for the corvid; Addicts became flighty and aggressive, developed a taste for invertebrates and rotting meat, and while none of them completely lost their grip on their sentience, many of them lost their grasp of human language – and often took to mimicking the shrieking cries of real crows in combat. After several months of continuous exposure to Murder of Crows, the homes of these Vigor Junkies were gradually reduced to dark, filthy hovels littered with rotting food and splattered with bird droppings; shelves, mantels, chandeliers and even wall-mounted trophies became perches for future crows' nests, and windows throughout the properties were smashed to allow more crows into the decaying houses.

Because most of these citizens had been recluses prior to their addiction, it took a long time for anyone to notice that anything was amiss. Eventually, neighbours began complaining about the smell emanating from the homes of long-time addicts, and the police were dispatched to investigate – prompting immediate violence from the deranged homeowners; however, though several Vigor Junkies were incarcerated, a coverup was quickly instated before word of the side-effects could spread – one even more elegant than Fink's. By this time, Marlowe had begun to enjoy his time in the spotlight and had no intention of losing his newfound fame and fortune to a scandal; also at this time, the Fraternal Order of the Raven had already adopted Murder of Crows as their icon, weapon, and occasional fix, and had no intention of losing either of them. So, Marlowe and the First Zealot of the Order made a deal: the addicts would be inducted into the ranks of the Order and pacified through a mixture of indoctrination and regular fixes of Vigor; in exchange for this vital boost to their membership, the Order "donated" the properties of their new members to Marlowe, ensuring a hefty payout once they were properly cleaned. Grateful for the assistance, the secretive cult forged permanent ties with the aging businessman, granting him access to political influence rivalled only by Jeremiah Fink himself; Marlowe was even provided with an honour guard of Zealots, ensuring his safety as the Vox Populi grew in strength.

With Marlowe's advertising campaign ensuring sales and the partnership with the Order ensuring both profits and power, Murder of Crows proved so successful that Fink was forced to watch as his one-time scapegoat soared through ranks that had been denied him for decades – even gaining sufficient influence within Fink MFG to command the release of his own "patented" Vigors. His success was so great that, when the physical side-effects of Murder of Crows were finally discovered in the bodies of Zealots killed in action against the Vox, Marlowe was able to blame the scandal on Fink's "abysmal brewing facilities," and lay the loss of revenue and customers at his old superior's feet. In several timelines, this led to him departing the company altogether to form his own prosperous little business, and in some of these iterations, a corporate rivalry blossomed into a war.

But constants are always more frequent than variables, and Marlowe met his end at the hands of the Vox Populi just as Fink did – stabbed to death by his own Zealot bodyguards. In most iterations of Columbia, I only witnessed this in passing, if at all: in most timelines, my only encounter with Percy Marlowe was when I found his flayed scalp nailed to a board in Port Prosperity, along with those of every other member of the Founders too slow or too stupid to flee the wrath of the oppressed.

* * *

Because almost every single addict strong enough to fight was incorporated into the ranks of the Order, Booker and I didn't meet many civilian Crows in our varied journeys across Columbia. Most fled as soon as we approached, malformed figures leaping from balconies and soaring away in great corvid swarms before we could intrude on their solitary nests. Some were errant criminals deranged by addiction, others were just unlucky citizens fleeing recruitment by the Order. However, one of the civilian Crows became quite memorable in his own warped manner, particularly because he appeared to us in one of the more unusual variations of Columbia's history.

His name was Charles Washburn Rook (no, really), and he was a bodyguard and manservant to Josiah Saltonstall.

Sadly, to tell his story requires elaboration: in this particular timeline, Jeremiah Fink's attempt to assassinate the Luteces had backfired violently; having not seen any trace of his targets at their laboratories in Emporia, the robber-baron had grown impatient to claim the bounty of patents that Comstock had promised him, and decided to instead target their labs at Monument Island. The resultant explosion not only scattered the two scientists across the Possibility Space, but it tore my Tower to pieces almost three years ahead of schedule and sent a massive shockwave rippling across the local fabric of space and time. In the wake of the disaster, thousands of citizens found themselves exposed to the memories of their counterparts in neighbouring realities, and many were driven insane by the cognitive dissonance; others began obsessively acting out the lives of their other selves regardless of how it conflicted with reality; a few were even merged with their other selves, some of them flickering in and out of symbiosis, others fused permanently. One way or another, Columbia was immediately plunged into a three-cornered civil war between the Founders, the young Vox Populi, and those now known as the Tear-crazed; in a matter of hours, Father Comstock's utopia was transformed into a nightmarish battleground second only to Rapture in sheer unmitigated chaos.

While the devastated military remained locked in stalemate with the Tear-crazed hordes loose in the city, the Founder elite sought refuge in heavily-fortified palaces and airships, leaving Columbia to burn while Comstock and Fink continued their byzantine power games in the skies above the war zone. Everything was provided for them on these vessels: luxurious homes, barracks for private security forces, laboratories, greenhouses for food production, even factories; Jeremiah Fink's opulent private flagship (the appropriately named _Midas_ ) doubled as a colossal manufactory for weapons, airships, and even the Vigors that so many innocents had died over. In this timeline, Vigors remained the exclusive domain of the military and were never distributed to the public – not intentionally at any rate.

It was aboard one of these airships, _The Caged Bird_ , that I was imprisoned following the destruction of Monument Island… once I was out of intensive care, of course: the wounds I sustained in the fall of the Tower almost killed me, and the explosion of the island's Lutece Field generators would have easily finished me off if Songbird hadn't been fast enough to save me. I spent eighteen months being slowly patched back together by Founder surgeons, all of them hell-bent on ensuring that I could fulfil Comstock's mad prophecy – even though the city was in pieces and might never recover enough to "drown in flame the mountains of man." They gave me skin grafts, organ transplants, facial reconstruction, everything they could to make me look the part of the Prophet's daughter again – though admittedly I still looked quite dissimilar to my other iterations. And though Comstock's scientists were loath to grant me any additional abnormalities, graft rejection syndrome forced them to augment me with genetic material from other realities. So, despite their best efforts to suppress the development of further powers, my ability to manipulate Tears was supplemented by Vigor-based telekinesis and weather-control, though all three powers were kept in check by the Siphon built into the prison ship.

On the day when Booker finally arrived to rescue me, his capsule ended up being launched directly into my prison ship, ruining the siphon and sending the airship on a death-dive back into Columbia proper; the two of us barely had a chance to get to know one another before the ship crash-landed. By the time Booker had regained consciousness, Songbord had already arrived on the scene and recaptured me, hastily depositing me in a safehouse on the other side of the district. When Booker attempted to give chance, he immediately found himself in a city on the verge of collapse: though Columbia still retained much of its pristine grandeur, Lutece Field generators all over the city had begun to fail after years of neglect, and many buildings were within days of simply dropping out of the sky. Later, Booker reported seeing one such structure, a belltower sitting across from New Eden Square, swaying wildly as its generators struggled to keep it aloft; unable to maintain altitude, after a few minutes of wobbling in mid-air it simply tipped over and plunged towards the ground – sending one of its bells crashing down on the cobblestones as it fell.

Not too far away, past the Arch of the Angel, Booker first encountered Charles sitting on a bench just a few feet away from the park where his "employer" was pontificating. Before the Shockwave, Charles had been a gardener to some of the wealthiest households in the city, admired for his skills but regarded with contempt for "afflictions unbecoming of the white race": mute, club-footed, barely-literate and almost terminally shy, Charles was an embarrassment to the uppermost echelons of the Founder hierarchy, most of whom were quite open in proclaiming the physical and mental superiority of Columbia's white Anglo-Saxon populace. However, these same hard-liners were often too paranoid and bigoted to even tolerate the presence of black or Irish servants, and so the silent gardener was tolerated – barely – on the condition that he remain completely unobtrusive while at work. It was this inconspicuousness that kept him alive for almost three whole years in the ruins of Columbia, for where many unaffected survivors tried to escape and were cut down by the rampaging bacchantes, he kept his head down and weathered the storm as best as he could. Tragically, this approach finally backfired when Josiah Saltonstall claimed Shaleworth Mansion as his own – and found Charles still living in the servants' quarters. One of the few members of Comstock's inner circle unlucky enough to be caught in the shockwave and merged with a number of his other selves, Saltonstall had come to believe that he was on a campaign trail for local election, and needed bodyguards to that end: Charles was the last unlucky citizen to be press-ganged into the aging politician's retinue, and out of all of them, he was only one Saltonstall liked enough to be empowered with a Vigor. Force-fed bottle after bottle of Murder of Crows, Charles was addicted in a matter of days, his loyalties to his new employer effectively assured.

By the time that Booker met the two of them, neither master nor servant were especially sane: Saltonstall had dressed both himself and the park for an election, and had taken centre stage at the gazebo to preach the virtues of defending Columbia against the "foreign hordes" – totally oblivious to the fact that he was addressing an empty park. Perhaps twenty feet away, Charles sat in silence, feeding the vast flock of crows that had gathered around him – and _on_ him; he never stirred, even as they perched atop his perpetually-hunched shoulders and pecked at his ears. He wasn't the most imposing sight in the world, I gather: a tired old man, clad in the same clothes he'd dressed and slept in for the last three years – a battered bowler hat, shoes almost worn through at the heels, trousers torn and tattered, and a waistcoat now hopelessly encrusted with birdshit.

But when Booker was mistaken for an assassin and Saltonstall called for aid, Charles immediately sprung to life, bombarding Booker with crows as he and his master fled the park for the nearest Sky-line; unfortunately, his clubfoot left him too slow to keep up with Saltonstall, and Booker's charge on the pair sent Charles tumbling over the railing. He landed heavily on the roof of a parked freight container three hundred feet below, shattering his spine on impact; as if to add insult to injury, not only did his employer casually abandon him there, but Booker also stole a Murder of Crows bottle from his body.

And yet, Charles didn't die. Comatose and barely alive, he remained slumped on the freight container for almost an hour, narrowly avoiding an explosive demise when Saltonstall opened fire on the park with a mortar turret mounted on the edge of the neighbouring district, remaining unconscious while Booker reduced the mortar and its operator to molten slag. However, it wasn't until long after Booker and I had reunited while escaping from an angry mob of Tear-crazed that the Founders arrived to investigate the area, drawn by alarms raised by both their Handyman operative and Songbird. Finding the ex-gardener clinging to life, intrigued Fink MFG researchers scraped what was left of him off the container and hauled him back to the _Midas_ for detailed analysis. Finding in him a useful test subject, they went about swiftly rebuilding him through direct applications of healing Vigors unique to the timeline; then, they dosed him with concentrated doses of Murder of Crows and then accelerated his mutation through direct exposure to Lutece Field radiation. Conducted under laboratory conditions and expert supervision as it was, his transformation was much more stable than that of most Vigor Junkies, with doctors being careful to dimensionally excise any mutations that weren't functional. When Charles finally emerged from the surgery two days later, a pair of massive black-feathered wings sprouted from his shoulders, and where once the crows had only gathered in their dozens, now they gathered in their _thousands._ Impressed, Comstock gave Fink permission to send him into the field.

In the beginning, Charles was employed as a scout: with Columbia a war zone, dimensional anomalies flourishing, and so much of the old security systems destroyed, locating me was almost impossible even for Songbird. So, Charles and his birds were sent into the field to track me down, deliberately conditioned to transmit an alert signal to Songbird whenever he (or one of his crows) caught a glimpse of me. In this respect, he operated in a similar fashion to the Boys of Silence, though he had the advantage of a much wider field of view: on almost every street corner from Finkton to Emporia, Charles' crows gathered in search of the False Shepherd and the Lamb, scrutinizing every single passer-by to enter their airspace… and whenever that distinctive music-box tone rippled out across the rooftops, Songbird was soon to follow. Twice in a row, Charles found us and signalled Songbird; on the third time, he strayed too close to us at Battleship Bay – and this time, Booker shot him in the chest with a sniper rifle before he could start transmitting.

Annoyed, Fink's researchers hauled their half-drowned bloodhound out of the waves and dragged him back to the _Midas_ for medical attention. Once again, they exposed him to further Vigor treatments, accelerating his mutations further and augmenting his strength with a prototype harness; then, they expanded the range of his alarm signal to reach not only Songbird, but the entire Founder fleet. By now, the Vox Populi had finally broken the three-year stalemate by capturing one of Fink's lesser factory-ships, and with Daisy Fitzroy targeting me for assassination, Comstock wanted me retrieved at any and all costs. This time, the doctors didn't bother pruning away the less functional mutations, and when Charles returned to the field, he did so as more of an animal than ever: talons in place of hands and feet, a mass of sharp quills protruding from his bald head, his lips hardening into a beak, his eyes devoid of light, some of the more religious Tear-crazed mistook him for a demon.

In this new form, he finally caught up with us in the ruins of Finkton – and this time, his new harness allowed him to easily overpower Booker in single combat. Doubly unfortunately, though I was able to force Charles into a hastily retreat with a telekinetic hailstorm of bricks, I wasn't fast enough to stop him from summoning reinforcements as planned. However, Fink responded to the signal first: fearing for his standing with Comstock, already endangered by the blundered Lutece assassination, he attempted to regain face by sending the _Midas_ to recapture me personally – only to find too late that his former home was actually the Vox Populi's current base of operations. In a matter of minutes, Daisy Fitzroy's ragtag fleet was able to overwhelm the giant airship's defences, then board it; while the rest of the Vox Populi army and their Tear-crazed auxiliaries overwhelmed the defenders, Daisy made a beeline for Jeremiah Fink with Booker and I in hot pursuit. By the time we caught up with the two of them, Fink was already leaving aboard his escape yacht; unfortunately for him, he'd spent too much time loading the airship with all his ill-gotten gains, too intent on building a new life for himself in "the Sodom Below" to pay attention to the fact that someone else had boarded the yacht. While Booker and I vaulted across the Sky-line towards the fleeing airship, Daisy had already cornered Fink in the wheelhouse, shooting him in the kneecaps and pitching him overboard scant seconds after we arrived.

Meanwhile, as the rest of the Founder fleet belatedly arrived on the scene to do battle with the growing Vox fleet, Charles entered the factory-ship in an attempt to continue his search – only to end up getting shot with a Barnstormer RPG by Cornelius Slate. Flung into a vat of brewing Vigor by the explosion, Charles received his final and most potent dose of Murder of Crows: he emerged as a ravening monster, more reminiscent of a giant crow than anything human, his face almost torn open by the growth of a beak, his body covered in malformed feathers, and his limbs reduced to boneless, vestigial flaps. By then, his mind was so hopelessly mangled by repeated mutations, grievous bodily trauma and space-time distortions that he could barely remember his own name, let alone how to operate his signalling device; all he could remember was his mission, and the carefully-conditioned desire to complete it at any cost.

So, he set off once again, this time with no oversight from the Founders, pursuing Booker and I across Emporia. However, when he finally tracked us to the gondola to Comstock House, the frenzied hunter made the mistake of attacking me, having forgotten his intended role in summoning Songbird in favour of just capturing me; unknown to him, Songbird had been zeroing in on us ever since we'd left Victory Square, and my old protector didn't take kindly to the sight of the now-unrecognizable scout assaulting me. With no way of communicating with his attacker and all semblance of familiarity lost in the wake of his unplanned mutations, Charles was quite literally torn apart by the enraged Songbird.

However, even in death, Charles Washburn Rook played a small but vital role in the future: while following Songbird to Comstock House, Booker happened to stumble upon the dead scout's body, retrieving from it the device that had allowed Charles to signal Songbird. It took time, effort and considerable modification, but eventually this humble device became our means of controlling Songbird – and disabling the great Siphon contained aboard the _Hand of the Prophet._ Thus, this iteration of myself made to the Sea of Lighthouses, and joined my assembled incarnations in erasing Columbia from the multiverse.

All for want of a horseshoe nail, as the saying goes.

* * *

The Fraternal Order of the Raven was unusual, even by the standards of the Vigor-armed crème de la crème: of all the elite classes, they were the only one to obtain any kind of power in Columbian politics, and despite being technically a civilian organization, their Zealots of the Lady formed the basis of some of Comstock's most fearsome defenders.

As with most of these elite Vigor Junkies, both the Order and the Zealots had their genesis in Columbia's military, though not in the usual manner: true, many of the soldiers who'd had a chance to experiment with Murder of Crows to the point of addiction eventually became founding members of the cult, but they would have never left the Flying Squad had it not been for the men assigned to safeguard Comstock and his family – the Pretorian Guard to Comstock's Caesar. When Lady Comstock was murdered by her husband and Daisy Fitzroy framed for the deed, the Prophet's personal guard naturally took the fall: shamed in the eyes of all Columbia for their "failure," they were dishonourably discharged, stripped of all medals and privileges, divested of their bank accounts and left to live out the rest of their miserable lives as pariahs. More than half of this disgraced battalion committed suicide; the rest of them vanished into Finkton's underbelly, unable to bear the scrutiny of respectable Columbian society. However, one determined young sergeant took to haunting the Memorial Gardens, eventually approaching the Prophet during a visit to Lady Comstock's grave and begging him for a chance at redemption: against all odds, Father Comstock relented, and gave the surviving bodyguards the tools to cleanse themselves of their crime.

Though not accepted back into the ranks of the Flying Squad, the guards were instead given a modest civilian organization to run, complete with an imposing lodge at the end of Constitution Square to serve as their base of operations: with a reasonable budget at hand, they were officially tasked with recruiting ordinary citizens fanatical enough to serve as a militia in times of emergency, and singling out "dissidents" among Columbia's minority communities for arrest. Designed as a religious movement, the nascent Order championed the Prophet's belief in white supremacy, donning uniform robes deliberately modelled on those of the Ku Klux Klan in acknowledgement of their ideological origins, revering John Wilkes Booth as a saint for assassinating "the Great Emancipator," and adopting a sword as their symbol in honour of Columbia's first and most important emblem. However, they also strove to achieve redemption by avenging Lady Comstock's murder, not only adapting the sword to that purpose but adopting the symbol of the coffin to demonstrate their penance. But it wasn't until the Vigor-addicted snipers sought membership among the brotherhood that the group's newly-established leadership realized the power of Murder of Crows: in a matter of weeks, the brotherhood adopted the Crow as both their third symbol and weapon of choice, and with that, the Fraternal Order of the Raven finally crystalized in its modern form.

Admittedly, it wasn't the most accurate title in the word, but Fraternal Order of the _Crow_ just didn't have the same ring to it; then again, it's not as if anyone would have ever bought a Vigor called Unkindness of Ravens, either.

Once consumption of Murder of Crows became a ritual among the Order's slowly-forming membership, a strict hierarchy formed: at the lowest levels were the baseline recruits, barely given more than a drop of the Vigor upon their initiation; next were the acolytes, those who'd earned the blue robes of true membership, periodically granted the blessing of the Vigor to further their development but rarely enough to grant them an immediate edge in combat; then, there were the lieutenants of the Order, the Zealots of the Lady. As the brotherhood's champions, they wielded its symbols as both weapons and personal garb: armed with ceremonial broadswords and a full container of Murder of Crows, they not only wore black robes modelled upon the feathers of the blackbird they admired, but also weighed themselves down with hand-carved ebony coffins chained to their backs. From the moment he ascended to this role, a Zealot was expected to wear the coffin for every waking hour of his life, deliberately punishing himself for weakness through the heavy casket's back-straining weight; only in death would he be allowed respite from his burden. However, despite the presence of the coffin, Zealots were rarely cumbersome in battle, for by the time they were promoted to this role, most of them were long-term Vigor-Junkies fully capable of teleporting themselves across the battlefield as deadly flocks of crows.

As for the sergeant who'd convinced Comstock to grant them redemption, the man once known as Barnabas Fletcher ascended to the role of First Zealot, the master of the Order. The most revered of all "the Feathered Brothers," he had indulged his addiction and increased his abilities tenfold over the course of the Order's foundation, eclipsing all other Zealots in sheer power. Only Comstock could command the First Zealot's allegiance – and judging by some of the things Booker found in the Lodge were any evidence, the Prophet's grip on his tamed ravens was beginning to slip, even before the Vox rebellion.

From an outsider's perspective, the development of the Order is a microcosm of Columbia itself: pious, almost-optimistic beginnings with profoundly sinister motives; a distinct turn towards the unpleasant; the emergence of a frightening reputation; and a long downhill slide into madness and depravity. Initially, their emergence into Columbian society was met with admiration and pride, and many pious gentlemen of the upper-middle classes began seeking out membership in the hopes of demonstrating their commitment to Father Comstock's ideals through affiliation with the most conservative of his flock. For a time, they were even regarded as heroes for the part they played in hunting down the Vox Populi, with the Minuteman Gazette ensuring that their "heroic deeds" were known throughout the city; early filmmakers were even able to capture footage of Zealots swooping down on fleeing Vox in colossal swarms of crows, gaining further approval from the citizenry.

Then the first scandals started creeping into the public eye: people began noticing the strange war-cries and distorted voices that members of the Order exhibited after a few months; servants at the lodge started reporting unusual sightings – plates of rotten meat left out for the crows, bird droppings left to gather for days on end, curtains torn as if by talons, even glimpses of blood on the floor. And though the Zealots were careful to keep their robes on and their hoods up in public, sharp-eyed citizens could still notice the talon-tipped fingers if they looked closely enough. Rumours spread of "upstanding white folk" being assaulted for prying into Order business, of treasures stolen from the Sodom Below being hoarded in secret vaults beneath the lodge, of cannibalism, satanic rituals, even treason at work among the Zealots; Father Comstock, having bigger fish to fry, refused to confirm or deny these accusations – only making things worse in the long run.

As it happened, quite a few of these rumours were true: the Feathered Brothers were not above issuing vicious beatings upon white trespassers – if they felt that they could get away with it; the Order was indeed holding certain treasures in their vaults, though most of them were scientific ordnance looted from Vox Populi strongholds; while never openly treasonous, quite a few members of the brotherhood had begun to outline theories suggesting (correctly) that Comstock was of Sioux descent, a line of inquiry that the self-loathing Prophet would have been unlikely to tolerate. And many Zealots were, in fact, outright cannibals – though they only practised their Vigor-induced appetites through their use of Murder of Crows, and they only targeted "the lesser races": all too often, criminals apprehended by the Order never made it to the police; all too often, Vox safehouses were ransacked before the army could reach them, their inhabitants dragged screaming into the night; all too often, innocent residents of Finkton would simply vanish from their homes in the space of a single evening, never to be seen again. Booker witnessed one unfortunate victim of the Order's ritualistic appetites – one of the city's Chinese citizens – being tied to a post and stripped almost to the bone by a flock of hungry crows. None of the Founders cared, of course, and none of the gossipers would have cared had the Order been able to assure them that white meat was off the menu; but nobody cared to address the problem, and so the rumour persisted.

Though it never lost the respect of Columbia, the Fraternal Order of the Raven ultimately lost the love of the people, and were soon reduced to the role of bogeymen and living ghost stories to most of the city's populace. By 1912, few dared approach the lodge except on official business. By the time Booker arrived, "official" initiations had long since tapered off, and most of the remaining membership had achieved the rank of Zealot, leaving only a skeleton crew of lesser ranks at the lodge – all others being dispatched on search-and-destroy missions throughout the city. In hindsight, this might have been the only thing that saved my father's life: had all the Zealots been assembled in the lodge at the time of Booker's visit, they would have easily overwhelmed and killed him. As it was, Booker was able to make his way through the lodge and onto the Sky-line trail that led him to Monument Island – and from there, to rescuing me.

Ironically, despite the soured reputation of the Order, the city didn't turn on them in the end, nor did Comstock. Instead, over the course of the Vox Populi revolution, Daisy Fitzroy was able to locate conclusive evidence of the Prophet's role in Lady Comstock's death and broadcast it across the city: the Order was instantly split down the middle – one half remaining loyal to Comstock, the other joining Daisy's cause in a frenzy of righteous anger. Trading their black robes for crimson Vox vestments and painting their coffins blood-red, they descended upon Emporia, intent on enacting their ultimate vengeance upon Comstock – often clashing violently with their conformist brethren along the way.

Back in the present, the First Zealot was among the loyalists, and over the course of the revolution, the Founders lionized him for the part he played in culling enemy Zealots from the ranks of the Vox, often claiming their coffins as trophies in the process. His devotion was so great that, as Comstock started running out of lieutenants and the tide turned in favour of the revolutionaries, that Fletcher was appointed the Prophet's personal bodyguard towards the end; however, he held the post only briefly. In most timelines, he died in the saturation bombing of New Eden square, but a rare few iterations of Columbia, he died in battle with Booker and I as we escaped Comstock House – easily one the toughest battles in our entire journey: the First Zealot refused to attack us head-on as was the case with most of the Order; instead, he dissipated into the largest swarm of crows ever seen on Columbian record (two hundred and fifty _thousand_ ) and swept down upon us in a living tidal wave of razor-sharp beaks and knifelike talons. Though Booker was able to keep Fletcher at bay with barrages of volley-gun fire and whittle away at the vast Murder with Devil's Kiss, it took my expanding powers to truly end the threat First Zealot once and for all: calling upon the same Tear I had used to break free in the operating theatre, I summoned a tornado into the area – tearing through the bulk of the Murder and scattering the survivors hither and thither. Unable to reform, Barnabas Fletcher was dissipated across Columbia, the last of the loyalists slain and the rest of them soon to follow.

Of course, as Booker's journey into the reign of the Lamb demonstrated, the rebellion didn't last forever: in the nightmare timeline that would have ensued had I not been rescued from Comstock House, my future self was able to restore the Prophet's reputation and pacify the rioting Order – usually by slaughtering them to the last man and conscripting new members to replace them. Ultimately, the Order and the benefits of their chosen Vigor were too useful to do away with, and so the success story of Murder of Crows continued even as all other Vigors slowly vanished from shelves. As Elizabeth Comstock ascended to the role of the Lamb, Columbia's extremism soared to new and terrible heights – during which, most of the Order's most secret practises were made official and even laudable. In a further nod to the maddened bigotry that had consumed the city, the Zealots adopted white robes in homage to their KKK roots, and took to bathing in the blood of "race traitors" and "heretics" in grand demonstrations of their faith.

In the end, however, the Fraternal Order of the Raven was wiped from history with the rest of Columbia… and with the possible exception of the Rapture Family, I've never been more thankful to see an organization die.

* * *

The origins of Murder of Crows are among the most unusual of all the Vigors, in no small part due to the mysteries surrounding the world it originated from: the Luteces only managed to make a tertiary investigation of the world the Vigor's tears connected to, and the time of writing, in-depth explorations have only unearthed the tiniest thimbleful of information.

Back in Columbia, once the Luteces had isolated the reality that the strange, transformative phenomena had emerged from, their gateway opened on a world that seemed (at first) perfectly hospitable to human life: under a cloudless sky as pale as freshly-fallen snow, lush green meadows flourished, broken only by majestic silvery-blue oceans and vast stretches of woodland too dense to navigate; however, the most common terrain of all belonged to the immense metropoles that dotted the world's surface. Composed entirely of pure white marble, each city was a neoclassical monument, a forest of sculptured Corinthian columns and dignified statuary, a mountain range of perfectly smooth domes and evocative friezes, a realm of amphitheatres and hippodromes and triumphal arches and impossibly intricate fountains. For good measure, each of these shining cities were connected through elevated marble roadways crossing meadow, forest and ocean alike, all the better for the citizens of this otherworldly empire to travel… had there been any citizens, of course.

While Robert was busy theorizing the possible history behind this fantastical place and wondering why Murder of Crows could have come from such a place, the ever-pessimistic Rosalind observed a simple fact that had eluded her more sanguine brother: despite being more than capable of supporting human life, despite giving every indication that it was home to a thriving civilization, this strange world was completely deserted. The streets were empty, the buildings abandoned, every single city that they could see through the gateway was devoid of human life. Puzzled, the Luteces turned their gaze across the wilderness, to the roads, the meadows, the forests, the oceans: however, though oceans teamed with life and various rodents made their home across the plains, no sign of humanity could be found – not even close to the roads.

For a time, the two could only muse at what could have eliminated the population, quickly ruling out war and natural disasters on the grounds that the cities would have born the scars – and as Robert observed, none of these metropoles demonstrated any kind of damage. But if a plague had caused this, where were the bodies in the streets? Who would have had the strength to clear away the corpses had a pandemic destroyed all humanity in this world? Who would have had the life left in them to sweep the streets and polish the marble? And if the disaster had happened far enough into the past for the bodies to decay entirely, then why had the same decay not touched the city? From what the Luteces could tell, the cities were completely untouched by the outside world. More confusingly, closer investigation showed no sign that the cities had ever been occupied _at all_ : from what little they could see through windows and open doorways, the houses were empty, unadorned and almost frighteningly clean. It was as if someone had built a city – an entire network of cities, no less – just for the sake of amusement.

And then, just as they were wondering what the Murder of Crows phenomenon had to do with this world, a Tear opened in the central plaza of the metropolis the Luteces were observing, and a huge pile of human corpses tumbled out onto the marble; hurried examination of other cities across this reality revealed similar processes being enacted. All over the world, dead bodies were spilling into city squares and forums and hippodromes in their _millions_ ; there was no uniting cause of death – some had been stabbed, some had been hanged, some had been perforated with arrows, some had been shredded by automatic gunfire, some were diseased, and a few were little more than mincemeat.

Nor was there any uniting _source_ of these corpses, most of which remained unrecognizable until the Luteces' expanded their research into the wilder realms of the Possibility Space. Among the assembled dead were casualties of the Dragon Campaign, Weepers from Gristol, Splicers from Rapture, War Boys past the end of their half-lives, varied victims of the Midsummer Nightmare in New Crobuzon, 'mancers killed by the Flux, Captain Trips sufferers, Grey Wardens fresh from the Deep Roads, irradiated cadavers from the _Red Dwarf,_ Fremen stripped of their still-suits and crushed by Sand-Worms, Tzimisce "decorations," resistance fighters executed during the Scarran occupation, Greyscale-plagued Stone Men, ex-human monstrosities fallen from Sutter Cane's twisted kingdom of print and madness, Dr Arthur Arden's infamous "Raspers," civilians killed or converted in the Battle of Canary Wharf, passengers from Flight 627, tortured prisoners of Slaaneshi warbands and Dark Eldar pirates, Necromorphs with human prey still in their jaws, victims of the Krikkit Robots during their brief visit to Earth, treasure hunters ensnared by the Sierra Madre Casino, Batini Mages who'd sacrificed their lives to defy Paradox one last time, Innsmouth Academy staff and students, targets of both Agent 47 and HK-47, half-converted husks still impaled upon their Dragon's Teeth, victims of Ozymandias' attack on New York, security guards from Freddy Fazbear's Pizza, drug dealers with the words "PROPERTY OF TREVOR PHILLIPS INDUSTRIES" crudely carved in their flesh, men of Gondor killed at Osgliath, casualties of the Go-Away Wars, victims of the Blacklight Virus, Wraith prey from the Pegasus Galaxy, unfortunate residents of Chamberlain, Maine, and several hundred million people in distinctive red uniforms. Bodies from all over the Possibility Space gathered here regardless of the burial or destruction they'd supposedly received in other realities, victims of every sort of ending imaginable, members of every conceivable level of society all united in death.

And then, as the Tears shut, the carrion crows emerged from the forests in their _**billions**_ , swarming across the cities and glutting themselves on the corpses – more like airborne piranhas more than anything else. Over the course of this ghastly feast, every single body was consumed entirely, leaving nothing behind – not even clothing; even the residue left on the street soon vanished.

A few days later, it happened again.

Once the Luteces had worked out that this was a recurring process as natural as weather for this reality (and once they were finished throwing up), they theorized that after millennia of ingesting Tear-affected flesh, the crows had gained an affinity for dimensional irregularities: upon detecting a gateway depositing something in their world, they flocked to feast; upon detecting a gateway that would allow them out, they flowed outwards in an attempt to search for further prey. However, the same Tear-affinity that allowed them to seek out such anomalies gave wielders of Murder of Crows the ability to manipulate the birds – though the same mechanism also superimposed avian traits upon the users.

Eventually, the Luteces named this world Necropolis, and quietly left it to its grisly corpse-showers.

In the years since Columbia's destruction, I've joined the Luteces in their exploration of Necropolis, studying the Tear activity, analysing the architecture of the cities, trying to determine if humans ever lived there or not. But always, no matter how much we learn, a few questions always remain unanswered: who could possibly want to build an entire city – let alone an entire network of them – just for the sake of using it as a giant bird-feeder?

More disturbingly, are there any limits to the bodies this interdimensional Golgotha can summon? Before Columbia was erased from reality, the Luteces found that several Founder and Vox Populi casualties were deposited on Necropolis.

When I die – assuming I _can_ die – will my body end up here?

* * *

Did _you_ get all the references in the eighth-last paragraph?

 _Coming up next - Bucking Bronco!_


	5. Bucking Bronco

A/N: The latest chapter, everyone! I meant to post this earlier, but dental pain and illness got in the way. I'm grateful for all the views, reviews, favourites and follows; also, good job on getting so many references, Xzeihoranth! I hope you all enjoy this next installment, and I hope it lives up to the standards of the last few. Read, review, and above all, enjoy!

Disclaimer: _Bioshock Infinite_ and all its Vigors are not mine.

* * *

 _Break even the curliest wolf!_

Bucking Bronco was something of an oddball among Vigors: neither a great success nor an abysmal failure in Columbian society, it was middling in almost every way. It wasn't a controversial lead balloon like Possession or a self-destructive nightmare like Devil's Kiss, or even a dark horse victory like Murder of Crows; it didn't have Shock Jockey's technological niche, nor did it have the awesome combat potential of Charge, Undertow or Return To Sender. Its side effects were just disturbing enough to encourage rumour and speculation, but not immediately horrific enough to frighten Columbia at large; its powers were impressive, but not lethal enough to stand alongside more blatantly combat-oriented Vigors, and not quite stable enough to achieve consistent utility value – except in the case of habitual users. In all things, Bucking Bronco stood squarely in the middle of the road, and remained there throughout its time on the open market until Columbia was finally erased from the possibility space.

As one of the more visibly destructive Vigor phenomena, it quickly became a nuisance and an annoyance to the Luteces during its initial manifestations at the Tower: fortunately, because it wasn't as immediately lethal as Devil's Kiss, the human casualties were usually restricted to bruises, strains and the occasional broken limb. Of course, these spontaneous explosions of poltergeist activity usually ended with a great deal of extremely delicate equipment being broken when gravity finally returned to normal, and even the Luteces – who regularly squandered entire fortunes on their increasingly otherworldly experiments – weren't willing to see their laboratories ruined every time someone turned on a tap.

Once they were able to nullify the phenomena and begin committed research on the Tear-impregnated fluid, Rosalind and Robert were able to define this particular phenomena as "geo-telekinetic manifestation," a violent outpouring of extradimensional power at once seismic and telekinetic in nature: users of this newly-discovered phenomena quickly found themselves capable of levitating objects at will… and with time, practice and addiction, they were eventually able to do so without accidentally destroying them in the process.

Needless to say, once Jeremiah Fink inherited the Luteces' patents, it wasn't long before he took interest in the Vigor's potential: seeing shades of Rapture's Telekinesis and Sonic Boom plasmids, he gladly auctioned it to the military in a frenzy of plagiaristic excitement. Unimaginative by nature and eager to pander to what he saw as Columbia's "pioneer spirit," he branded the telekinetic Vigor with the title of _**Bucking Bronco,**_ and eagerly awaited the profits that would be due to him following the inevitable victories against the Prophet's enemies.

Unfortunately, his desire to emulate Rapture had once again overridden his good sense: though Bucking Bronco proved a useful resource to Columbia's military, it didn't have the immediate lethality of other Vigors, and was primarily used as a means of launching enemies out from behind cover, along with ancillary usage as a weapon of shock and awe. For a time, it was briefly trialled as an alternative to cargo hauling machines, but the volatile nature of the Vigor made this impractical except in the case of more advanced instances. For good measure, because Bucking Bronco wasn't used consistently, most users didn't have time to expand their powers beyond the norm, nor did they have a chance to develop addiction – keeping military sales down for some time. Though profits were stable enough to ensure a decent financial return, Fink had been expecting astronomical results from his latest attempt at plasmid mimicry, and the "failure" of his wonder product left him a sulking, petulant mess for months on end.

Eventually, he decided to transfer the Bucking Bronco to the civilian market. Once again, however, he'd gravely overestimated the mundane utility of his product: despite the proud slogan of _"whether you need it lifted, lofted, tossed or tumbled, Bucking Bronco is just the ticket!"_ the Vigor's lack of fine tuning meant that anything that users attempted to lift usually ended up getting broken – or in some extreme cases, floating into the open skylines and plummeting to the ground several thousand feet below. Fortunately for Fink, lawsuits resulting from such accidents were relatively limited, if only because none of his affluent customers had been hurt in the process. Nonetheless, word of Bucking Bronco's impracticality spread, and within a month of its initial release, nobody had good cause to use it at all.

In quite a few timelines, the story ended there; indeed, in some variations of our journey through Columbia, Booker never acquired Bucking Bronco at all. However, in the overwhelming majority of Comstock-centric realities, the Vigor was saved by a miraculous and frankly uncharacteristic spark of inspiration: just when it looked as though Jeremiah Fink's latest dream product would spend the rest of its shelf-life confined to a series of dusty warehouses less than a hundred yards from the factory that had produced it, event planners for Columbia's annual Raffle and Fair realized that that what Bucking Bronco lacked in practicality it more than made up for in spectacle; as one of the few Vigors that could be used for combat without directly harming its targets, it could be used for breathtaking but harmless displays of power. Though Devil's Kiss and Shock Jockey were more than equal to the task of impressing a crowd, wide-eyed onlookers marvelled most of all at the sight of masked performers hovering in mid-air under the influence of Bucking Bronco. Once such shows became commonplace, carnival planners expanded it for use in games of skill and chance: through carefully-formulated microdoses of the Vigor, fairgoers could utilize a brief variation of its power for "Cast Out The Devil," a live-action variant on Whack-A-Mole.

From then on, the civilian market used Bucking Bronco almost exclusively for games and entertainment. Indeed, an entire troupe of performers was created exclusively for displaying unique Bucking Bronco-guided stunts to the public, most of whom remained oblivious to the fact that these advanced powers came at the cost of chronic addiction.

Outside the realms of professional entertainers, "Cast Out The Devil" proved so popular with younger fairgoers that Fink actually marketed special variants of the Vigor to children in a similar fashion to the Minor Victory brand of cigarettes. "Baby Bronco" and "Little Hellraiser" proved surprisingly profitable, but Columbia's wariness around Fink's tonics meant that its usage was tentative at best, and often restricted by jittery parents.

Unfortunately, this only meant that children placed under such restrictions only became more determined than ever to sample the Vigor for themselves, and several went to increasingly ingenious attempts to acquire some for pranks and amusement: some bribed the household servants, others gathered in large groups to pool their pocket money, and a few particularly rebellious kids went so far as to shoplift it. Most were caught and disciplined before they could indulge themselves too deeply… but a rare few continued using it, not out of any desire to amuse themselves, but simply because they had come to enjoy the rush of sensations that the Vigor produced. Addiction blossomed, and unforeseen side-effects began to emerge.

By now, all of Columbia had seen the temporary alterations wrought on the human body by Bucking Bronco: first-time users had witnessed the skin on their hands cracking open like parched earth, forming bloody fissures and gaping crevasses across their flesh, until the brittle epidermis simply shattered; underneath was blood and raw muscles, but also raw, undiluted energy – bright enough to hide the blood from view, and potent enough to instantly smother the pain – unlike Devil's Kiss. Time and again, users saw the cracks on their hands flickering in and out of existence, and though the sight disturbed them, the impermanence of these injuries and the lack of pain or even physical discomfort encouraged recreational users to continue.

Over time, the abilities Bucking Bronco bestowed upon them became more potent, advancing from wave-based levitation to _true_ telekinesis; more advanced users gained the ability to levitate themselves, even fly; a few even developed a gift for warping objects at the molecular level – though in keeping with the geokinetic roots of their power, this was often restricted to the ground beneath them. Encouraged by the expansion of their abilities, these addicts continued experimenting.

However, as addictions became more intense, these symptoms became more permanent: the cracks in the users' flesh remained for longer periods of time, and soon were no longer restricted to their hands; arms, legs, trunks, even faces began to crumble and glow under the influence of the Vigor. In the intermediate stages of this affliction, sufferers looked more like broken dolls than human begins, what with their cracked faces and glowing, otherworldly eyes; the effect on their physiognomy was so unreal that some passers-by even mistook these unfortunates for masked actors dressed in the fractured faceplates of Motorized Patriots.

In the later stages, the fissures in the addicts' flesh widened into gore-streaked wounds as more of their flesh petrified and flaked away under the onslaught of the energies within; in the end, this power began to alter the flesh _beneath_ the skin, transmuting the muscles into glowing strands of ligament. By the time the last of their epidermal chrysalis had fallen away, the addicts had become luminous, ethereal beings entirely without skin, their bare muscles incandescing a vivid shade of coppery-silver as they luxuriated in the power that they had _become_.

No less dramatic were the _mental_ symptoms of addiction: to Vigor-junkies on Bucking Bronco, the expression and expansion of their power became more and more important until it gradually eclipsed all notions of purpose or consequence, or even reality. To the addict's altered brain chemistry, use of this power was more rewarding, more pleasurable, more _real_ than any physical sensation they had ever experienced, and they would do anything to continue indulging their predilections. In the earliest stages of this psychological degeneration, this predilection often took the form of attention-seeking behaviour: junkies would readily show off their powers to any audience that was available to them, taking joy in both the flexing of their metaphysical muscles and the responses of the onlookers; the next stage was one characterized by more destructive tendencies, with the enhanced power of the Vigor being used to inflict violence and suffering on any target that the addict could find; finally, power-fixation robbed the Vigor-junkie of their ability to interact with other human beings on even the most basic level.

Addicts at this final stage were little more than solipsistic ascetics, explorers of a world as barren and deserted as the surface of the moon: to them, other human beings were just elements of the scenery, objects that mimicked emotion and thought without achieving either. As such, most of these Vigor-crazed solipsists spent most of their time ignoring those around them, indulging their powers in habitual expression of the energies they had come to fixate upon, until some random aspect of human behaviour piqued their interest – and prompted them to investigate in as horrific a manner as possible: like children scorching ants with a magnifying glass, they would toy with the objections of their attentions for hours on end, sometimes breaking their bones with telekinetic blasts, sometimes fusing them with the ground their energy erupted from, sometimes levitating them past the safety of Columbia's atmospheric shield just to watch them asphyxiate and freeze in the colossal altitude. Not even family members were spared this terrifying fusion of obliviousness and sadism; only other addicts and their drug of choice existed in the same reality as the afflicted.

Once again, however, fortune smiled on Jeremiah Fink across the possibility space: had Bucking Bronco been anywhere near as successful as he'd hoped, it would have meant his financial ruin; as it was, the limited spread of addiction allowed him and Comstock to clamp down on the afflicted users in as swift and efficient a manner as possible. Because the Vigor-wielding entertainers were invariably under contract from Fink MFG and because most of the afflicted children had been brought up in families loyal to Comstock above all else, most cases of addiction were easily kept secret before they could enter the public domain. In the case of the Bucking Bronco performers (or "Rodeo Clowns" as they were playfully titled), most of them wore masks for their duties anyway, and with consistent medication and specially-arranged housing, they could easily be controlled. In the case of the latter however, matters became far more complicated.

By Comstock's decree, children who'd developed the symptoms of Vigor addiction would have to be isolated for the safety of the general public, and their dutiful parents immediately sequestered them at home for the foreseeable future – believing that one day their Prophet might cure them through the favour of God. Once it became clear that no such miracles were forthcoming, the families of the afflicted took careful steps to ensure the safety of their sons and daughters: alibis of illnesses and delicate constitutions were invented to ensure that nobody questioned the absence of the "Little Hellraisers"; home schooling was arranged, courtesy of heavily-vetted tutors; and last but certainly not least, homes were reinforced with steel bulkheads and electromagnetic locks, courtesy of the greatest fortunes the Founders had to offer. Some mothers and fathers doted on their afflicted children, nurturing them even as their behaviour degenerated into open solipsism; others treated their addicted offspring as the black sheep of the family, left to rot in the attic like the Monster of Glamis.

When Daisy Fitzroy's revolution exploded across Columbia, most of these isolated addicts were left to their own devices: in the case of the Rodeo Clowns, Fink had instituted a practise of keeping them secured in specially-made holding cells between performances; most of the children had either been orphaned by roaming gangs of Vox Populi, or (in the case of more neglectful parents) had simply been abandoned when the call for evacuation began. However, the Hellraisers and the Clowns did not sit still for long: even the ones lost in their own solipsism weren't interested in remaining caged, and even before enterprising looters started wondering about might lie behind those armour-plated doors, the Vigor-junkies were already staging breakouts. While the Founders struggled to maintain their grip on their beloved city and the Vox overran their defences, the Bucking Bronco addicts wandered freely across the deserted residential districts in search of what little amusement could reach them through their psychotic ennui.

Eventually, the Hellraisers and Clowns began gathering into a single cohesive group, a gaggle of flayed children and skinless, barely-masked entertainers united by their obliviousness to anyone who hadn't been exposed to their Vigorous addiction. Then they took to the air, a vast parade of bloody muscles and energy-infused tendons floating through the air in search of amusement, the Clowns arcing through the sky in a haunting aerial ballet, the Hellraisers singing unearthly, ear-piecing hymns on embolism-inducing wavelengths. Behind them trailed the stragglers, a small trail of latecomers struggling to keep up with the festivities.

In a handful of timelines, Booker and I had the privilege of seeing the parade floating over Port Prosperity as we arrived, casually swatting a Founder troop transport out of the air as it passed. Unfortunately, this turned out to be something of a bad omen: not long after we entered Emporia, a straggler arrived on the streets – a Hellraiser, still in the destructive phase. After watching entire buildings being demolished in a fit of pique by an unimposing eight-year-old girl, neither of us were eager to challenge her; instead, we resorted to stealth. By that stage, we'd long since gotten used to hiding from Songbird on the rare occasion we ended up blundering into one of Comstock's security systems, but even with all the experience we'd gained by that stage, finding a way through the wreckage without alerting the Vigor-junkie to our presence was nothing short of agonizing; at the slightest sound, the Hellraiser would telekinetically upend – or _dissolve_ – everything within her immediate vicinity just to see what might be hiding behind it. Anyone unfortunate enough to be caught in the beam of the Vigor-junkie's searchlight – Founder, Vox Populi, Tear-Crazed or neutral – was instantly obliterated, devoured alive by the very cobblestones they stood upon.

This nerve-wracking game of hide-and-seek concluded with Songbird arriving on the scene: the ensuing brawl reduced most of the financial district to partially-disintegrated wreckage and sent the remains of Albert Fink's Magical Melodies studio plummeting towards the ground. I still don't know exactly how long the stalemate between the two combatants held, if only because Booker and I were too busy trying to stay ahead of the district's collapse to pay attention to the titanic battle: all I know is that Songbird didn't take kindly to losing my trail again – and when Booker triggered the silent alarm at the gondola to Comstock House, my guardian was ready for him.

For the rest of our journey through Columbia, the Hellraisers and the Clowns remained at the New Garden of Eden, indulging their powers in the ruins of the Welcome Centre. They never once stirred from their solipsism – not even when their reality finally blinked out of existence.

* * *

Like the Preachers of the Way, Vigor specialists based upon Bucking Bronco were rare: given the mental effects of this particular form of Vigor addiction, it was almost impossible for the Founders to keep the volunteer specialists focussed on the task at hand once solipsism set in; candidates had a distressing tendency to wander off and start disassembling government buildings for their own amusement. Even when Comstock's experts were able to penetrate the many layers of solipsistic apathy and induce something akin to fear or anger in their test subjects, there was no gauge on the amount of force these Vigor-junkies would use once provoked to violence: if they regarded something as a threat, they would annihilate it – along with anyone or anything else within range. In most iterations of Columbia, the Prophet usually ordered such experiments aborted and every single test subject executed before they could become a problem; however, a few timelines hit upon an inventive solution to their volunteers' eccentricity, and in these worlds, a unique form of Vigor specialist took to the streets.

The Final Judgments were not intended for use in conventional warfare, nor were they armed for straightforward combat. Nor, as many initially believed, were they intended as artillery to supplement ordinary mortar emplacements and Firemen. Much like the Preachers of the Way, they had been infused and trained as a desperate gambit to stop the spread of the Vox Populi, but where the Vigor-demented clergy stemmed the tide through propaganda and coordinated urban warfare, the Final Judgements operated entirely through scorched earth tactics. For all intents and purposes, they were living weapons of mass destruction, and it was their duty to eliminate any district that had fallen to the Vox Populi – no matter how many Founder-allied civilians had to die in the process.

The process of creating a Final Judgment was relatively simple, especially with so many late-stage Bucking Bronco addicts still incarcerated on Comstock's orders: a Vigor-junkie of sufficient strength was to be secured in a reinforced steel canister, kept isolated from all external stimuli and pacified through intravenous doses of Vigor. Sarcophagi such as these were to be planted at the very heart of every single endangered district, and connected to a network of security systems; in timelines such as these, the Boys of Silence had been developed far earlier in Columbia's history (albeit without most of the dimensional connections that made their mainstream counterparts so terrifying in combat), and they quickly joined the likes of automatons and mosquito bombers in keeping the district secure.

In the event that the Vox Populi completely overran the area and the army was unsuccessful in repelling them, the surveillance network would issue an alarm to the Final Judgement's casket: automated systems within the sarcophagus would disconnect the occupant from their Vigor supply, then bombard the Vigor-junkie with security footage intrusive enough to trigger violent anger in the subject. Then, the canister would be opened: freed from sensory deprivation and assaulted on all sides by unpleasant stimuli, the Final Judgment would become aware of the enemies surrounding it – and retaliate.

Thanks to the additional fuel provided by the Vigor tank, the resulting explosion of Bucking Bronco would be violent enough to eradicate anything within a mile radius of the casket; in many cases, the invariable seismic pulse would also rupture the Lutece Field generators, sending what remained of the district tumbling out of the sky.

Once the Founders realized that they had a weapon that could accomplish in seconds a feat of destruction that would take an entire fleet of airships hours to complete, they quickly took steps to exploit this. Indeed, they were able to delay the Vox advance by several days simple by dropping one such Final Judgement in the middle of Finkton, destroying most of the factories and leaving the Vox Populi struggling to produce enough arms to continue their revolution. Unfortunately for the Founders, this proved to be the exception rather than the rule, and attempts to deploy their newfound weapon as a means of aerial bombardment rather than self-destruction often went badly: as it happened, the Final Judgements were most effective as stationary devices, and the occupants of the caskets responded badly to unexpected movements – a fact that became clear when half the Founders' attack fleet abruptly exploded in mid-air.

Fortunately, Booker and I were able to avoid districts that were completely overrun for most of our journey through the timeline. Unknown to us, however, Comstock's prophetic streak served him better than expected: having witnessed his demise at my father's hands through the Tears, he outfitted both Comstock House and the _Hand of the Prophet_ with Final Judgements: if the Prophet's lifesigns ceased, the caskets were prepared to open on a countdown – one that would only stop if the security network also reported that Booker was dead.

Because he believed that the Tears were a gateway to prophecy and not possibility, Comstock had not explored every possible consequence in his timeline, so he could not have known what would happen as a result of this particular stratagem. Nonetheless, he presumably imagined that without my father's influence, I would ultimately succumb to indoctrination and take up the mantle of the Lamb. He may have even believed that I might somehow be induced to kill Booker in order to save my own life.

Had he been alive to see the results of this final gambit, I've no doubt Comstock would be disappointed.

Having absorbed the memories of my other selves, I'm no stranger to death: over the course of our escape for Columbia, thousands of my counterparts in less-successful iterations of the journey died in a multitude of ways – crushed in the collapse of the Tower or drowned in the plunge to Battleship Bay, caught in the crossfire between Booker and the Founder hitsquads, lynched by the Vox Populi, killed in airship crashes and falls from the skyline, sometimes even dying of old age in the reign of the Lamb… and there were other deaths, an entire vista of possible murders and accidents and mishaps beyond counting, growing steadily more unusual as the realities pushed the boundaries of constants and variables. Once, Songbird crushed me to death in a fit of possessive rage, his supposedly-infallible emotional programming corrupted by dimensional merging; in a few timelines my powers spiralled out of control following a malfunction in the Siphons and ended up eviscerating me when a random Tear opened _inside my body;_ sometimes I never made it as far as the Tower at all, dying of childhood illnesses a matter of days after I arrived in Columbia.

Out of all those horrific experiences, my death at the hands of the Final Judgement is the only one that I can somehow look back on with something akin to triumph, for in all the iterations of this timeline across the possibility space, one constant remained absolute: neither of us succumbed to Comstock's last, desperate gamble.

* * *

By large, Vigor phenomena were usually drawn from highly inhospitable realities, often devoid of sentient life, and the few that did support intelligent populations tended to exhibit physiologies that could best be described as abstract at best and utterly nonsensical at worst.

Bucking Bronco and the World of Exaltation were notable exceptions to this rule. When Rosalind and Robert isolated the source of its phenomena and prepared a gateway to its reality of origin, the Tear opened on a world that – at first sight – appeared to be very similar to Earth: varied biomes, relatively hospitable environments, and a thoroughly industrialized society of mostly-human life-forms. More impressively, the planet was entirely at peace: no wars, no oppressive governments, no violent uprisings – by all appearances, the world that they had discovered was a utopia. After witnessing so many nightmare realities and uninhabitable wasteland realms through their portal, the Luteces were immensely relieved, and briefly considered using this new world as a winter retreat… right up until they noticed the phenomena that had given rise to this dimensions' Vigor.

Dotting the planet were dozens upon dozens of monumental craters, some of them over a hundred miles in diameter. More to the point, they had not been created by meteor impacts or any sort of aerial bombardment, but from an explosion _beneath_ the ground – one that was clearly still underway: all of the craters were emitting vast beams of gold-and-crimson energy in vertical rays stretching hundreds of feet into the exosphere.

These beams of light projected at all hours, never ceasing, never faltering, never stopping day or night; anything that made the mistake of crossing the threshold and making contact with the energies was instantly flung into the sky, where they would hover for several minutes before recovering gravity and plunging to their deaths. More unfortunate investigators were either petrified by the beam's transmuting radiation or simply disintegrated by extreme telekinetic phenomena, their molecules violently disassembled by the light of the craters.

Needless to say, it didn't take long for the Luteces to recognize what their Bucking Bronco phenomena had been derived from. By all appearances, Tears emerged within the craters and captured a nanoscopic portion of the light, thereby allowing the Vigor's user a fraction of the beam's true power; as with all users, habitual use allowed greater portal access and greater control to this power, of course. However, even once they had learned to adjust the location and position of their portal viewer, the Luteces could not determine the precise source of the crater energy: attempts to study the vast shaft carved into the bedrock by the power of the beam only resulted in their Tear becoming unstable and winking out of existence. So, for the time being, they theorized that the crater energy emerged from a source somewhere deep beneath the planet's surface, if not within the very core of the planet itself.

However, as they began studying the native culture for clues as to how this phenomena had come about, Rosalind and Robert found that the people of this reality had responded to the crater light in a _very_ unusual way: far from avoiding these potentially lethal weather patterns, the inhabitants of this world persisted in building cities less than a mile from the edge of the craters, leaving the majority of the urban populace bathed in the vivid glow of geotelekinetic energies throughout their lives. Not only that, but the craters themselves were almost always surrounded by a small crowd of individuals who had chosen to abandon the urban lifestyle in favour of basking in the glow of the crater beams on a permanent basis; there they stayed, worshipping the light and luxuriating in its energies, even as their flesh petrified, cracked and peeled away to reveal bloody, luminescent muscles.

Some of these unfortunate worshippers would die of their petrifaction, reduced to bloodied half-statues frozen on the rim of the craters, while others would sacrifice themselves to the light by flinging themselves into the path of the beam. But somehow, no matter how many people died, there would always be more worshippers leaving the cities. Indeed, many of them did their best to entice others into joining them at the crater and grew violent if anyone attempted to remove them; and while not all of them followed Bucking Bronco's mental side-effects to the letter, many of those that succumbed to petrification did fall into solipsism in the days prior to their death.

Through careful remote-access study, the Luteces discovered that the light itself had an intriguing effect on those in close proximity to it, gently stimulating the pleasure centres of the brain and often triggering catastrophic addictive behaviors. The cities of this world had been situated close to the craters so that their people could bathe in the euphoria-inducing rays of the crater light – which they called _**Exaltation**_ _._ The cults living out on the edge of the craters were composed of unfortunate citizens who'd grown jaded and desensitized to the thrill over years of exposure, and could no longer sustain their addiction at its city-level dosage. Presumably, this was the precise cause of Bucking Bronco's mental side-effects, though fortunately the light was considerably diluted by its passage through Tears: not only were the Luteces spared addiction, but only the _users_ of the Vigor suffered the side-effects, not their targets.

The World of Exaltation is still a matter of considerable uncertainty: further research demands from Comstock meant that Rosalind and Robert were ultimately forced to move on before they could complete their survey, and the three of us still haven't gotten around to continuing where they left off. However, before they ended their study of Exaltation, the Luteces discovered something rather unusual on the lip of the largest and oldest of the craters: the centre of an ancient hub of worship, a great temple had been built around the crater, complete with colossal ziggurat-style stairs leading to the rim of the pit. Above the altar from which the high priest of the proclaimed his gospel, a statue of their leading deity stood, arms outstretched to embrace the addicted congregants.

According to snatches of overhead conversation, this figure had been the goddess who had bestowed Exaltation upon the land and blessed the people with its light. Normally, I'd have been inclined to believe this was a purely subjective facet of their belief system – one of the few not totally subsumed by the populace's addiction. But I've seen the photographs the Luteces took: the statue was a perfect replica of my Tower on Monument Island.

Their goddess was – by all appearances – the Angel of Columbia, the divine messenger who had inspired Comstock to build his shining city.

Curioser and curioser…

* * *

 _A/N: Coming up next - Shock Jockey!_


	6. Shock Jockey

A/N: And at long last, the latest chapter! Sorry for the month-long delay: health problems kept me bogged down with anxieties for most of August, but I'm back at long last. Hopefully I won't be subjected to any more problems, and I'll do my best to pick up the pace in the meantime. Thank you to all who favourited, followed and reviewed - I'm glad you liked the latest chapter, Xzeihoranth, and I hope this latest installation lives up to quality standards. Read, review and above all, enjoy!

Disclaimers: Bioshock is not mine, nor are any of the franchises crossing over over the course of this chapter - see if you can spot them!

* * *

 _Who needs the power company?_

Throughout their time in public circulation, Vigors were more than just luxury products to lavish upon the city's elite: to Jeremiah Fink, they were a means of emulating the Olympian successes of Fontaine Futuristics, a means of reaching the same kind of profit margins that were previous achieved only through the exploitation of ADAM. Many Vigors were modelled upon similar lines in the misguided hope that they'd be able to fit the same niche that Plasmids had filled in Rapture, even though no such niche existed in Columbia. As such, where the works of Tenembaum and Suchong were adapted to fit Rapture's increasingly dangerous environment, Columbia itself had to be adapted just so that certain Vigors could be utilized outside of combat – a costly and extremely inefficient process: laws were passed, damning testimonials were erased, bribes were payed, and new machines had to be installed all over the city.

Nowhere was this theme of mimicry and adaptation more evident than with Shock Jockey, Fink's cargo-cult knockoff of the Electrobolt Plasmid.

From the moment he peered into Rapture's corner of the possibility space, Jeremiah Fink had been enamoured with Electrobolt's unique multipurpose applications throughout the oceanic metropolis, noting with envy its capacity for use in pacifying rioters, electrocuting attackers, and even jumpstarting unruly machinery. As such, when he first found mention of the electrokinetic Vigor among the Luteces' notes, he thought he'd found his own variation of the Plasmid, and eagerly began production of what he believed could only be a bestseller. Unfortunately, Fink's greed had once again eclipsed both his rationality and his interest in reading all those troublesome warnings.

The first problem lay in implementation: in much the same way that other Vigors didn't alter the drinker's genetic code, Shock Jockey didn't directly bestow the power to conduct and manipulate electricity. Instead of being endowed with the unnerving but otherwise painless ability of electrokinesis, the first test subjects found themselves unexpectedly disfigured by crystalline growths of electroconductive quartz: for as long as the Vigor was active, fresh growths of crystal sprouted from their bodies, perforating flesh, distorting skeletons, and leaving the subjects wracked with an agonizing pain rivalled only by Devil's Kiss – often compounded by the intense heat and blinding light emitted by the crystals. As with all Vigor-related deformities, these growths vanished as soon as the dose of Shock Jockey wore off, but it was still an immediate blow to Fink's hopes of ensuring instant product popularity.

The second problem soon became clear when he began making arrangements for demonstrations of the Vigor before Columbia's military. While transporting a consignment of Shock Jockey up to the factory showroom, the cargo freighter accidentally collided with a passing air yacht, spilling almost a gallon of Vigor all over the loading dock; within a matter of minutes, the entire area was covered with fungal growths of luminous blue and purple quartz, all of which erupted into gouts of lethal voltage at the slightest touch. Much like Devil's Kiss before it, Shock Jockey was a volatile concoction, and unlike its fiery predecessor there was no way of guaranteeing a consignment free of catastrophic impurities: no matter how carefully it was prepared, one in every five batches of the Vigor would end up sporting enough instabilities to make accidental spillages a potential death sentence for anyone in range – and more often than not, there was nothing that could be done about it short of scrapping the entire batch.

Fink, being Fink, refused such safety measures and had the faulty batches sold without any kind of warning whatsoever.

As with many such combat-oriented Vigors, Shock Jockey enjoyed a rich career within Columbia's military: along with its most straightforward applications in combat, it also saw extensive use as the Vox Populi began recruiting in volume, with Columbian soldiers delighting in their power to plant lethal traps of electroconductive crystal in the enemy's path. Similarly, the ability to debilitate opponents without killing them outright made Shock Jockey so useful that it was even made available to certain police precincts for use in arresting difficult suspects. However, it's most valued military application was not in combat or capture, but in punishment and interrogation: with Father Comstock demanding that Vox prisoners repent for their crimes before being executed and the Founder elite insisting that their comrades be brought to justice as quickly as possible, electrical torture soon became very effective in ensuring remorse-driven confessions, many of which were photogenic enough to be filmed and disseminated to the general public. Thus, even in realities where the Columbian military proved too conservative to accept the Vigor's value in combat, Shock Jockey still found a happy home in interrogation rooms across the possibility space – except of course for those rare and bloody timelines where it had been replaced by Possession.

Eventually, however, Fink set his sights on the civilian market, determined to make Shock Jockey as popular among Columbia's private citizens as Electrobolt had been in Rapture. Once again, however, Fink had grossly overestimated the similarities between the two cities: quite apart from the fact that most potential customers were still suspicious of Vigors and there was no civil war to encourage home defence spending, Columbian technology couldn't be jumpstarted as readily as that of Andrew Ryan's utopia; it simply didn't operate by the same adaptable mechanisms as Rapture. But then again, even if jumpstarting was possible, Shock Jockey wouldn't have achieved much in civilian hands.

To put things in perspective, Electrobolt was developed in a city where electrical power was ubiquitous and almost every single utility and convenience involved machines; by contrast, a highly-conservative populace with little trust in science meant that electric lighting and coal-powered furnaces were the most advanced technology that could be found in the average Columbian home, with only a handful of immensely wealthy Founders accepting any of the radical new machinery into their homes. Thanks to Comstock and Fink's efforts, most of the technology was in the hands of the government or Fink MFG – and none of it could be electrokinetically powered.

With the market unwilling to cooperate with his grand designs, Fink fell back on encouraging potential customers with public demonstrations. However, not content with his usual strategy of hiring Vigor-performers to dazzle the crowds, he instead took the expensive and highly-risky step of installing a number of special new generators in specific locations throughout the city: these devices were usually connected to the most visible attractions in Columbia and could only be powered by Shock Jockey, a firm demonstration of just how useful the Vigor could be on a regular basis. At the time, it was hoped that such demonstrations (aided by the popular slogan _"who needs the power company?"_ ) would eventually encourage the public to accept Shock Jockey as a reliable source of power. As further encouragement to the civilian market, Easter & Son's latest models of automated stallions were powered exclusively by Shock Jockey; and before the Vox Uprising brought research to a halt, there was even a line of portable generators being developed for use in powering home appliances, just to encourage Vigor sales further.

Unfortunately, Fink soon found himself with another folly to his name: as highly-experimental pieces of machinery, quite a few of the generators exhausted their fuel supply much earlier than intended, requiring Vigor-empowered Fink MFG technicians to remain on standby. Addiction rates among company personnel skyrocketed, and despite the best efforts of the technicians to remain hidden, the less-than-pleasant side-effects of Shock Jockey soon entered Columbia's rumourmill. For the sake of the company's reputation, Fink had the generators scrapped and replaced with a completely redesigned series: barring the occasional bug, the new model could operate for longer periods of time before requiring another jumpstart, and the "protective gear" warn by the refuelling technicians hid their Vigor-induced deformities from view. However, the damage had already been done, and if anything, Fink's attempted coverup only exacerbated things; the mysterious figures in form-concealing jumpsuits and helmets did not go unnoticed by the gossipmongers for long, particularly once the mental side-effects of the Vigor set in. Fortunately, a comparatively small and easily-culled workforce, combined with the strict placement of generators around Soldier's Field and the Hall of Heroes, ensured that few outside Fink MFG's laboratories knew the truth.

Affectionately known to the company scientists as "Lightning Rods," Shock Jockey addicts were among the most aggressive of all Vigor-Junkies: whereas most users could only be provoked to violence after being disturbed from their obsessions – or driven mad by crippling pain – the Lightning Rods actively sought out opportunities for bloodshed and destruction, a direct consequence of their worsening physical symptoms.

As use of the Vigor continued, the quartz growths became more numerous and more pronounced; by the time their deformities had become permanent, long-term sufferers often sported up to twenty separate growths at various points on their bodies. Much like their counterparts among the Hellions and the Clowns, such deformities made them outcasts within Columbia, as the enormous crystal stalagmites protruding from their flesh could not easily be disguised – though many more were given away by the telltale smell of ozone wafting that surrounded them. Many were also crippled by their growths, limbs permanently broken when a crystal grew right in the centre of a bone; some were blinded when fresh crystals began forming within their eyesockets.

However, few if any of them suffered as a result: thanks to the Tear activity in their bodies, electricity was transmitted freely between the crystals in their flesh, rendering their nervous systems increasingly inured to pain. When the crystalline metastasis reached the skull, growths and electrical manifestations began to warp brain activity and alter personalities – invariably for the very worst: later dissection and study of Lightning Rod brains revealed that both electrical and crystalline distortions tended to occur most commonly in regions of the brain concerning aggression and inhibition control. Long-term addicts became foul-tempered, pugnacious, and thanks to their insensitivity to pain, almost suicidally reckless; worse still, disruptions to the body's serotonin delivery system meant that many of them couldn't even experience happiness except in combat, guaranteeing an addiction to violence almost as extreme as Vigor dependency.

Fortunately, Shock Jockey addicts were comparatively rare in Columbia and its many variants: its limited utility ensured that that few private citizens ever had cause to use it, ensuring that most users could be found in the ranks of Comstock's armed forces or in the pay of Fink MFG. If insanity became noticeable in these users, they were either quietly eliminated or imprisoned for life within the company labs.

Much like the Chained Devils, these unfortunates were condemned to years of isolation and humiliating experiments until the Vox uprising set them free; unlike the Devil's Kiss addicts, however, Lightning Rods rarely lasted for very long after escaping: almost too volatile to be reasoned with and too reckless to refuse the call to combat, many turned on the very revolutionaries that had rescued them – only to end up getting shot dead before they could even draw blood. Others left in search of opponents with which to test their mettle, taking great delight in duelling the most powerful of Fink MFG's creations in epic battles to the death: Firemen, Zealots of the Lady, Hellions, Clowns, Centurions, Motorized Patriots, Handymen and even the mighty Songbird were challenged… and because the Lightning Rods had no instinct for self-preservation and lacked even the most basic sense of pain, most of these battles ended with the challenger being viscerally smeared across the pavingstones. Out of all the addicts released from the company labs, only five of the thirty incarcerated Lightning Rods agreed to work with Daisy Fitzroy – and then only because she offered them an opportunity to lead the charge against Fink's defences. Few survived.

As such, Booker and I rarely ever met the Lighting Rods: on the few occasions when we did, Booker dealt with them via sniper rifle before they had a chance to attack; lacking the intangibility of the Crows or the resilience of the Chained Devils, and having no interest in actively defending themselves, these Vigor Junkies died just as swiftly as any ordinary combatant.

The one exception to this rule was, of course, Captain Cornelius Slate.

A newly-addicted Lightning Rod at the time of his death, Slate's violence was not attributable to Shock Jockey or any other Vigor in Fink's product line, but instead to the ideals he was so devoted to. Much like Andrew Ryan, Sofia Lamb and Zachary Comstock himself, the one-time war hero of Columbia was driven to his most desperate and deranged acts by an overzealous commitment to his own philosophy – a commitment shared by the soldiers under his command. However, in his efforts to force Booker to give him and his men "a soldier's death," he gorged himself on Shock Jockey during the final minutes of his life, and suffered a catastrophic overdose – along with all the mental and physical maladies that came with it: by the time of our final confrontation in the Hall of Heroes' courtyard, the dignified colonel had degenerated into a howling berserker crowned with the distinctive pockmarks of Shock Jockey quartz, screaming his defiance at the incoming Founder vessels as he bombarded our defences with a hail of electroconductive crystals and eye-searing bolts of lightning.

In some far-flung variations of this battle, Slate's Vigor-fuelled rage proved so cataclysmic that the overdose simply shredded him into a heap quartz-studded gibbets, barely clinging to life. In most, he was able to weather the side-effects just long enough to lead Booker to the final confrontation before he finally collapsed, exhausted and crippled from internalized growths of crystal but very much alive. However, in both cases, Booker was faced with the choice of either sparing Slate's life or granting him the death he craved – a choice between being a tin soldier or a real one, as Slate himself put it.

And in worlds where Booker chose the former, the two of us soon discovered that Comstock and Fink had methods of suppressing even the most troublesome Lightning Rods… along with anyone else who happened to oppose them.

* * *

Because of the aggression commonly exhibited by its long-term users, Shock Jockey rarely became the basis of an elite unit: most attempts to make Lightning Rods into a cohesive fighting force usually ended with the gathered addicts slaughtering each other in gruesome melees, while Fink's efforts to condition individual Shock Jockey users into special operatives were met with even less success; unlike Songbird, the Lightning Rods couldn't be so easily brainwashed, nor could they be indoctrinated like the Firemen. In most timelines, Fink lost interest in making something of his "little Mjolnirs" and abandoned his plans for the elite Vigor Junkies.

Much like the Preachers of the Way and the Final Judgements, elite Shock Jockey wielders were confined only to a handful of timelines across the possibility space – those where the Vox uprising occurred far earlier than usual: in this variation of Columbia, the city was divided neatly between fortified districts controlled by the revolutionaries and the heavily-guarded regions where the Founders continued their opulent reign over those still subservient to them. Within their borders, the two great powers remained preoccupied with their attempts to maintain control of their own territory: the Founders redoubled their efforts indoctrinate their remaining servants, namely through horrific surgical procedures, whilst the Vox publically tortured and executed anyone remotely connected with the Founders. On the outer reaches of the controlled districts, where the streets were emptied of civilians and business lay in ruins, brutal street fighting was the norm: soldiers and militiamen riddled one another with gunfire, Founder artillery blasted Vox airships from the sky, Vox Handymen pummelled Motorized Patriots into scrap metal, and the few citizens unlucky enough to be caught in the middle prayed that neither side would find them.

In these conflicted regions, Vigor Junkies were prized for the abilities that could tip the balance in their faction's favour, and with the manufactoria of both sides busied with an arms race to produce the most effective living weapons, it wasn't long before one of them solved the problem that other universes couldn't crack. In an unexpected twist, the elite unit of Shock Jockey specialists were not developed by Fink MFG – they weren't even developed by the Founders: instead, the Vox Populi won that particular arms race.

Known as Typhoons for their violence and unpredictability, these specialists weren't intended for straightforward combat in the border regions, but instead for surprise attacks within the Founder-controlled districts. A symptom of the extremism that had overtaken the Vox revolution, the Typhoons were created by rounding up Founder-allied civilians from the border regions and all but drowning them in vats of Shock Jockey until they developed the sustained powers and psychopathy commonly demonstrated by the Lightning Rods; kept docile through a mixture of pheromone cocktails and Possession, they were given thirty-seven hours to complete their metamorphosis before being returned to Founder districts in their hundreds. Because the Typhoons had long been recognized as citizens loyal to Comstock, they were allowed back inside without much in the way of questions, the border guards simply assuming that they had been attempting to wait until a disputed region returned to Founder hands.

Once inside, the Typhoons followed their masters' instructions to seek out densely-populated areas (plazas and markets being a popular choice) and wait until their control mechanisms finally wore off. Upon being released from their chemical restraints, the Typhoons would attack anyone within reach, charging the surrounding crowds in a frenzy of bloodshed and lethal voltage. With simultaneous outbreaks of Vigor-fuelled carnage occurring across the districts, military forces would be directed away from border defences to subdue the apparent rioting, allowing the Vox Populi an opportunity to press their attack and claim fresh territory – leaving Founder society demoralized and panicked regardless of whether this unorthodox tactic worked or not.

Essentially a mass-produced regiment of living time bombs, the Typhoons were not expected to return alive: once their chemical restraints wore off, these frenzied marauders would not stop until they either ran out of victims or someone finally killed them. And because there were so many of them, a handful managed to escape Founder retribution in the ensuing chaos, the overwhelming majority of them going on to conduct suicidal massacres of their own… except for the improbably rare few who managed to develop an iota of cunning. These outliers spent their lives hiding in the sewers of the disputed regions, suppressing their natural pugnacity through long periods of dormancy, and left their dens only to gather bottles of Shock Jockey and fresh victims – not to kill but to convert. In deep wells of collected Vigor, they would leave their captives to wallow until they had developed enough of the mutations and derangements necessary to become new Typhoons. Once they had an army, they would ascend to finally satiate their depraved appetites in blood and lightning.

Eventually, Comstock ordered a purge of the sewers, and the Typhoons were all but wiped out. By then, however, the damage had already been done: with men and airships being removed from the border to suppress the Typhoon infestation, the Vox Populi had been able to exploit the gap in the defences and send in an invasion force, and were able to make it as far as Emporia before the Founder airship fleet realized the danger. From there, the Vox were able to engineer a siege of nearby Comstock House, sending their fleet to cut off any attempts to escape by air and crowding the streets of Emporia with all the militiamen they could muster; though they couldn't break through the fortress's imposing defences, none of the security gunships docked there were fast or powerful enough to break through the Vox blockade, leaving the Prophet effectively imprisoned in the very heart of his domain.

Outside the besieged fortress, Emporia languished under the reign of Daisy Fitzroy's lieutenants: police officers were executed, shops were looted, buildings were bombed into dust, and anyone who refused to denounce the Founders was sentenced to a brutal term of hard labour in one of the airborne factories the Vox had "liberated" from Fink MFG. Within a week, the stately upper-class commerce district was reduced to a virtual ghost town, seemingly deserted except for the Vox army congregating in Victory Square. By that stage, the civilian populace were in hiding, either in their homes or in whatever boltholes they'd been able to scavenge after being left homeless; anyone unlucky enough to be caught out on the street risked a beating from the vengeful Vox troopers. Those who were found guilty of being employed by the Founder government were taken to the square and shot, their death throes being filmed and projected on every populated street in the district; Booker and I were unlucky enough to walk in on one such execution where the condemned was a postman convicted for "disseminating enemy propaganda." Sadly, these were among the gentlest of punishments: less than two hundred yards away, preachers and acolytes of Comstock's bastardized faith were condemned to fight to the death in lethal gladiatorial games with the surviving Typhoons, while the loyal churchgoers were forced to watch the massacre and applaud dutifully – or risk becoming the next contestants.

By then, Booker and I had already met the Typhoons, having been living in the disputed regions for several days. In fact, we'd begun our journey there: in this timeline, heavy bombardment by the Vox fleet had compromised the security measures on Monument Island, allowing me to escape from the Tower and venture out into Columbia proper. Songbird followed of course, and would have easily recaptured me – if Booker's capsule hadn't accidentally collided with him; as such, I found a hiding place deep within one of the disputed regions of Columbia, where I stayed until Booker finally found me (though not before he'd been forced out of the Founder-controlled districts by another Typhoon incursion).

Needless to say, my father and I had a lot to deal with in those early days even before our journey took us to Emporia: thanks to damage to the Monument Island siphon, my powers were much more potent and far more unstable than they were in more mainstream timelines, putting us at risk every time I was forced to use them. In some cases, we found our current sanctuary infested by Blackwood Pines Wendigos, Brute Splicers loyal to Sophia Lamb, Nosferatu-ghouled alligators, packs of Cardiff Weevils, Cronenberged humans from C-137, Niffins incandescent with thaumaturgical power, shambling Wights from the Land of Always Winter, or even by the legendary Slake-Moths of Bas-Lag. In others, extradimensional weather patterns bombarded Columbia with hailstones, storms of razorblades, volcanic ash, coronal rain, plagues of locusts, and the occasional tsunami of boiling blood.

In a few mercifully rare cases, countless bystanders were subjected to dimensional merging – not only with the memories of their other selves, but their _bodies –_ creating a host of chimeras spawned from the same person's iterations across the multiverse. If they were lucky, these individuals found themselves merely shifting randomly from one body to the next, suddenly aging to senescence or regressing to childhood, shifting through all spectrums of gender and sexuality, and in some cases even changing species. The _less_ fortunate were blended on a more visceral level, with limbs and heads fused together by the dozen to form hideous agglomerations of tormented individuals, infantile bodies sprouting from the flesh of the elderly, and living human beings conjoined with the decomposing corpses of long-dead alternate selves. Most horrific of all were the abominations that were spawned when dimensional merging descended on Vigor Junkies like the Typhoons, driving them even deeper into insanity and expanding their powers a thousandfold; hundreds of casualties were likely to result in the case of even a single merged Vigor Junkie being provoked to violence, usually only ending if I was strong enough to dispose of them via a Tear.

With all this in mind, Booker and I were anxious to find someone who could help me master my powers. Unfortunately, with the normal sequence of constants being hopelessly jumbled out of order, the two of us had no experience with Comstock or the malignance of the belief system he'd fostered – or even that he was looking for me; all we'd been able to learn was that he understood my powers and might have some means of helping me to control them. Deprived of even the most basic evidence of what Comstock had planned, we set off on a desperate journey through Emporia to Comstock House – and all the horrors that place offered, beginning with Songbird's next ambush attack.

But that's a story for another day…

* * *

Attempts at investigating Shock Jockey's world of origin proved difficult: given the Vigor's overwhelming propensity to blast everything in range with electricity and layer almost every available surface with a fungible carpet of electroconductive crystals, the first two attempts ended with unfortunate lab assistants being either electrocuted or simply pincushioned from within by tumourous quartz growths. It took almost a month of modifications before the Lutece portal was shielded efficiently enough to allow Rosalind and Robert a glimpse of the reality that had spawned this strange phenomena – and even after that, they had to delay their experiment for several days just so they could properly reinforce the laboratory against lightning strikes.

Eventually, however, the Lutece twins looked out upon a world dominated by glittering pinnacles of luminous blue quartz up to a hundred thousand feet high, an endless vista of crystalline mountains beneath an unchanging canopy of storm clouds. Needless to say, it was an awe-inspiring sight, one rendered all the more intimidating by the constant lightning strikes that rippled across the mountains, every bolt arcing from one crystal to the next until the entire world was illuminated by electrical discharge. The ever-whimsical Robert dubbed this place "Astrape's Mirror," and despite Rosland's exasperation, the name soon stuck.

Initial surveys suggested that this world was barren of life: no evidence of native civilization could be found anywhere, and not even the most basic forms of flora or fauna could withstand the constant electrical onslaught. However, as they directed their roving portal away from the spires and plateaus, the Luteces discovered that they had not been the first to explore Astrape's Mirror.

In the deep valleys between peaks, they found the dilapidated remains of several hundred long-grounded ships, many of them varied enough for Robert to theorize that they had come from other planets – perhaps even other realities entirely. All of these ships had been damaged beyond repair by lightning strikes, but their cargo and hardware were just intact enough for the Luteces to surmise that these vessels had belonged to previous explorers; researchers, prospectors or colonists, all of them had braved the treacherous atmosphere of this world in search of data, wealth or a fresh start, and all of them had been blasted out of the sky not long afterwards – left to die on the barren surface of the planet below.

More disturbingly, further investigation revealed that the crews of these wrecked ships had not died as a result of the storms: the valleys of Astrape's Mirror were composed of nonconductive stone rather than quartz and heavily sheltered by outcroppings and cliffs, ensuring that the unfortunate castaways were protected from lightning strikes. Nor had they died of starvation, for though the harsh mountains offered no sustenance to stranded explorers, a thorough check of the crashed ships' cargo holds revealed that their supplies were virtually untouched – and in many cases, unspoiled. Instead, investigation of the bodies revealed signs of extensive violence: shootings, stabbings, beatings – if there was a method of killing imagined, it had been used, though by far the most popular weapon of choice seemed to be bare hands.

At first, the Luteces were under the impression that the castaway crews had taken up arms against one another, perhaps in an attempt to steal supplies or a working ship on which they could escape; however, no supplies had been taken and nothing had been scavenged from the ships, nor was there any indication that any of the vessels or encampments had been attacked from the outside. Indeed, it appeared that whatever violence had consumed the castaways had emerged from _within:_ captains had been stabbed to death by their first mates, officers had shot one another, and fellow crewmen had throttled one another – remaining locked in grisly embraces long after death. No matter how disciplined the crew, they had always dissolved into mutinies, rioting, and eventually wholesale slaughter. The only survivors of the carnage would always drag the corpses to the highest reaches of mountains before committing suicide, cutting their throats on rusted sheets of metal or impaling themselves on crystal shards.

Upon autopsying some of their less-than-fortunate lab assistants, the Luteces eventually realized the truth. They had been wrong when they'd assumed that the mountains were barren of life: the electroconductive quartz was actually a form of flora – specifically, a fungus similar in nature to Cordyceps. As such, though its mature form grew on inorganic materials and fed upon electrical charges, the Quartz-Fungus reproduced as an endoparasitoid thriving upon organic tissues, living or dead: once a life-form manifesting a pulse entered their sensory horizons, the fungi patches would begin emitting near-invisible clouds of parasitic spores, taking root in the internal organs of anyone who made the mistake of inhaling them; the infestation was twofold, not only inducing fresh growths of quartz crystals in the flesh of the host, but also allowing the spores to alter the subject's brain.

After sufficient exposure, the host would begin to manifest the pugnacity that had made the Lightning Rods so dangerous; upon encountering another living being (infested or not), the host would be compelled to kill it, allowing additional spores to infest the corpse's decaying tissues. This pattern would continue until everyone in range was infested or dead, whereupon the more animate hosts would spend the last remaining hours of their lives dragging the cadavers within reach of the next lightning strike, before killing themselves – ensuring that the fully-matured crystals would be able to feed upon on the electricity which they so readily conducted.

Normally, the Quartz-Fungi's most common prey were the lumbering Brontes-Apes that hibernated in the caverns deep below the valleys, infesting them in their thousands whenever their need to travel forced them to the surface. The unexpected arrival of explorers was a boon to their growth… and the creation of the Shock Jockey Vigor granted them heretofore unseen opportunities to reproduce. This particular form of vigor phenomena was based upon both the spores and the lightning of Atrape's Mirror, granting users access not only to the mind-warping fungi but also to the electrical discharges that their newfound crystals could channel, empowering them beyond any normal hosts; and because of the addictive properties of dimensionally-impregnated fluids (not to mention Fink's aggressive practices), the spores infested more bodies in the space of a week than Atrape's Mirror would see in the space of a single year. Indeed, some iterations of Columbia featured entire districts being overwhelmed by infestations of Quartz-Fungi, all because a few of the Lightning Rods managed to eliminate enough people to satisfy the spores controlling them; in fact, the only reason why Booker himself didn't join the ranks of these unfortunates was due to his transfusion into multiple realities, the unique dimensional activity in his body protecting him from the effects of the spores.

Once they were finished cataloguing their discovery, the Luteces decided to leave Astrape's Mirror well alone from then on, and left careful notes advising their successors to be cautious lest the Quartz-Fungi claim another batch of victims. Fink, being Fink, ignored them – but for the time being, Rosalind and Robert were content in the knowledge that they'd learned all the secrets this world had to offer.

Or so they thought.

The Luteces have since returned to Astrape's Mirror, now protected by their own interdimensional powers, and delved deeper into its surface than ever before. I've yet to join them on these voyages, but they tell me that they were horribly mistaken in their assessment that the world was bereft of sentient life: below the mountains, beneath the caverns, they found the outer façade of what appeared to be a massive wall hidden beneath the earth – the borders of a vast underground city. As of yet, they haven't ventured beyond the wall or learned if the civilization that built it is alive or dead; however, in the crumbling remains of laboratories left just beyond the expanse of these colossal fortifications, the two found evidence to suggest that the Quartz-Fungi was not a naturally-occurring species, but a bioengineered construct. Robert theorizes that the resulting endoparasitoid was an accident, and the people of this nameless city were forced to retreat into the planet's crust when their accidental creation grew to dominate the surface world; Rosalind, ever the more cynical of the two, speculates that the Quartz-Fungus was created as a biological weapon against the nameless city's enemies, and in order to keep the seat of their empire safe from future usurpers, they willingly infested their world with their parasitic plague and relocated to their subterranean metropoli.

One thing remains certain, however: like the Temple of Exaltation and Monument Island before it, the wall of this underground dominion was emblazed with the distinctive form of the Angel of Columbia.

The question remains: what were these people _really_ worshipping?

* * *

A/N: _Up next, Charge!_


	7. Charge

A/N: Aaand I'm back! Sorry for the delay, ladies and gents, but the change in seasons has brought an awful lot of unfortunate bugs with it. I'm alright now, sore throat aside, but I'm in catch-up mode.

Xzeihoranth - I'm glad you liked the world; don't worry about the references, though - I'll give everyone a big list of references at the end of the story.

Leikiz - I'm so happy you like the story so far; it's such an honor to know that you find the worldbuilding both intriguing and cohesive - I can only hope I can keep it that way. And yes, the gameplay of _Infinite_ wasn't spectacular - as much as I liked futzing around with Vigors and Tears, even I concede they could have done more.

Syuveil - thank you so much for the lovely review! I hope the Charge chapter lives up to the hype, and I will do my best to be prompt in delivering the Undertow chapter. Oh, and the Return To Sender chapter, can't forget about that!

Anyway, without further ado, the latest chapter! Read, review and above all, enjoy!

Disclaimer: _Bioshock_ is still not mine, proclaims the graffiti alongside "Lamb Is Watching" and "Daisy Fitzroy Hears Your Voice!"

* * *

 _Make an explosive entrance!_

Despite the many commercial blunders that Fink MFG committed over the course of its time in operation, major financial consequences were comparatively rare – prior to the Vox Rebellion at any rate. Put simply, its roots were too deeply enmeshed into the fabric of Columbian society, its place as Father Comstock's armoury too well-established; having guaranteed its indispensability to the Prophet's rule a thousand times over, the company was able to avoid economic penalties for the errors that crept into its products towards the end of the Founders' golden age.

Charge was the one exception to this: if Shock Jockey served as a demonstration of Jeremiah Fink's attempts to make Vigors essential to Columbia, Charge was a demonstration of what happened on the rare occasions where Fink's efforts blew up in his face almost immediately. Devil's Kiss was an obvious black mark on the company record, a commercial blunder made all the more egregious for how much property damage it left in its wake, but Charge was in a class of its own: it didn't merely _fail_ – it actively snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

With this in mind, the origins of the Vigor seem somewhat incongruous: the Tear-based phenomena it had been derived from were unimaginably subtle during their initial manifestations around the Tower, often going unnoticed compared to the likes of Devil's Kiss and Shock Jockey. Indeed, the Luteces might never have noticed anything unusual about those strange gusts of wind about their offices, had one of their assistants not made the mistake of drinking from one of the laboratory sinks: moments later, the unfortunate man stepped outside for some fresh air and suddenly achieved lift-off. By the time Rosalind and Robert arrived to investigate, the lab assistant was already departing Monument Island at an impressive pace. Against all odds, he actually managed to land safety on the roof of a passing cargo freighter before the Vigor effect wore off, and was eventually found wandering Finkton docks in a traumatized daze, almost crippled by acrophobia but otherwise unharmed.

Once they isolated the Charge phenomena as aerokinetic in nature and recognized its potential for unpowered flight, the Luteces once again filed away the details of the newly-defined Vigor in their notes, and then thought no more of it. By contrast, Jeremiah Fink was beside himself with excitement when he inherited the patents: consumed by visions of a world in which his customers could roam the skies over Columbia without the aid of air transportation, his sale of Charge to Columbia's military was merely out of habit, a stepping stone to the unimaginable profits he believed that the civilian market would earn him.

Charge's military successes were middling at best: in terms of combat potential, it offered its users an impressive surprise attack but unfortunately left them open to a counterattack unless the targeted enemy fell at the first strike; because the Luteces didn't complete their magnetic shield infusion until after their "deaths", none of Columbia's soldiers ever achieved the same vistas of resilience as Booker could, making Charge impressive in combat but ultimately impractical. As the effects of Charge became self-sustaining, Vigor-junkies became more useful as scouts, infiltrators and saboteurs, using their powers of flight to enter Vox-Populi bases from above and demolishing them from within. The most powerful of all took their ability to manipulate air currents to their logical conclusion: not only did they gain permanent flight, but the power to generate windstorms and even miniature tornados, transforming the former saboteurs into combat powerhouses capable of catapulting even the formidable Handymen off their feet. Nor were they shy about using these powers, for many a modern-day Icarus would arrive on the scene to the accompaniment of unexpected squalls.

Fortunately, the fact that such powers could only be developed over time meant that the military rarely considered the tactic worthy of repeated doses – unintentionally sparing Comstock's army from the disaster that ensued when Fink's latest folly became apparent.

Fink's attempt to repackage the Vigor for the civilian market was nothing if not disastrous. As always, he wanted to exceed the astronomical sales that Plasmids and other ADAM-based products had enjoyed in Rapture, and to achieve something that not even the master geneticists of Fontaine Futuristics had dared to attempt. Time and again, he'd observed Rapture through the Tears and wondered why nobody had ever decided to create a Gene Tonic that would allow the citizens to live comfortably in the ocean that lay beyond the city's walls: now he had the means of granting the people of Columbia a similar yet far greater boon, allowing them to become the angels of Comstock's earthly paradise – and earning a suitably lucrative bonus from Comstock in return.

Like Andrew Ryan before him, he refused to have the product tested or modified beyond its initial formation, and released it without thinking of the consequences. And in his bottomless hunger for wealth and glory, he failed to realize that aerokinetic flight might grant the people of Columbia the power to stray beyond Comstock's control – in much the same way that gills and pressure-resilient physiology might have granted the people of Rapture the power to escape the prison that their city had become.

Marketed for both home defence and transportation, Charge arrived on the market to considerable fanfare, often heralded by advertisements featuring lovestruck couples outpacing airships as they rocketed across the sky or by garish images of titanically-muscled heroes felling entire armies of Vox Populi with a single punch. Because the initial side-effects took the form of a painless miniature storm manifesting around the hands of the user, the sales weren't damaged by the symptoms exhibited by first-time drinkers, and for a time it appeared as though Charge might become one of the Vigor product line's rare victories.

Unfortunately, the sheer speed that users reached in flight repelled a good many potential customers, while those who weren't discouraged by the potential for airsickness soon found that they would have to keep drinking in order to maintain their new abilities. Faced with the prospect of having to pay quadruple the cost of the average aircab fare to continue flying under their own power, many simply gave up on Charge for good.

But as was the case with many of the Vigors, a hardcore few continued buying: consisting mainly of thrillseekers and fantasists with plenty of disposable income, there were rarely more than a hundred members of this demographic at any given time, and unlike the hermits and recluses who went on to become crows, the "Chargers" were usually very visible within Columbian society. As such, when a hundred of Columbia's social butterflies took to the air, their fellow citizens responded with great interest – and when the Chargers began to inexplicably vanish, it wasn't long before people began to wonder a bit about Fink's newest product.

Though they remained outwardly unchanged, the Chargers began to exhibit a powerful aversion to walking, remaining still, or even being in contact with the "ground" for any longer than a minute. Indeed, some concerned citizens attempted to drive the Chargers to set foot on the cobblestones again through cajoling, prayer, threats, and – if all else failed – force… only to discover that the Vigor-junkies' aversion could not be so easily overcome: as soon as the nets and ropes descended on them, they descended into screaming fits of claustrophobia, tearing at their eyes in paroxysms of rage and terror. Many prospective rescuers suffered broken bones when the Chargers retaliated, and almost all of them were forced to release their prisoners from captivity within an hour; for many days afterward, the freed Vigor-junkies would often shy away from ordinary human beings, hissing and frothing at the mouth if anyone got within twenty feet of them.

However, the shock of these failed conversions was nothing compared to the revelation that the Chargers voluntarily delivered to the Founders next. Hyperactive and easily-distracted though they were, the Vigor-Junkies were also perfectly open in explaining that the reason that they had been "vanishing" was because they had no interest in remaining in Columbia, even if leaving meant abandoning their homes, their families and even their church. Eschewing earthly society, they lived life almost entirely in the air, sleeping only aboard airships and feasting on what they could steal from unattended kitchens; many even claimed that they had taken to raiding the Sodom Below for food and entertainment.

Capricious, grossly immature, relentlessly attention-seeking, addicted to high-adrenaline thrills and openly dismissive of those who lived below them, the Chargers quickly gained a reputation as vandals and public nuisances, though their powers made them almost impossible to arrest and the fact that many of them simply no longer lived in Columbia made actually finding them an uphill battle – especially given that most of the Founders were secretly hoping that they'd simply lose interest and fly away. Nevertheless, the most fervent of their prosecutors never stopped trying.

But despite their heretical insistence on remaining independent of Comstock's paradise, the Chargers attained quite a few supporters among the Founders: these fanatics believed that their airborne counterparts represented a chance for "a second ascendance," in which the people of Columbia would become like angels and reclaim the innocence lost in the departure from Eden. Those of them familiar with J.M. Barrie's famous play even took to calling the Chargers "Lost Boys" and "Neverlanders" out of misplaced affection.

Some even took to joining them in impromptu ceremonies, force-feeding themselves Vigor until they learned how to fly under their own power… and thanks to the immense quantities of Charge on site, desperate household servants began imbibing the Vigor as well, believing that joining these Lost Boys was their best escape from their daily drudgery.

In most timelines, this was where the story ended: having realized the danger that the Vigor junkies posed to Columbia's status quo, Comstock waited until the flock gathered in one location, and then deployed Songbird to end the threat, wiping out half the Neverlander flock and driving the rest into a swift retreat from the city. Once he was finished giving Fink a rare but well-earned raking across the coals for allowing the situation to degenerate so thoroughly, he then ordered Charge to be removed from the civilian market in the single biggest product recall in Columbian history; for good measure, the military was given very strict guidelines on how the Vigor could be used, including a kill-on-sight order for any Vigor junkies demonstrating an interest in leaving the city.

As such, in most variants of our journey across Columbia, Booker and I only rarely encountered the Chargers, and usually under circumstances that might charitably be described as bizarre: I vividly recall one attempt at escaping Columbia via the _Hand of the Prophet_ being interrupted by an unexpected collision with an abandoned warship, now being used as a roosting ground for the Neverlanders, and they wouldn't let us leave until Booker and I could prove ourselves in an airborne race. During the Vox rebellion, Chargers would occasionally appear on the horizon, observing the carnage with interest but rarely approaching close enough to join the fray; those who did usually ended up getting into fights with the Little Hellraisers and Rodeo Clowns – fights that the Chargers usually lost. And in the reign of the Lamb, Comstock House was home to a small gathering of Lost Boys, successfully recaptured and indoctrinated through my future self's methods: chained to the walls or weighed down with leaden straightjackets, these sad souls could usually only float a few feet off the ground, whimpering piteously as they tried and failed to reconcile reality with the infinite possibilities that they had witnessed. Few could be forced to yield to the fanaticism of the Lamb, and so many were forced to languish as empty shells of human beings for the rest of their sad lives.

But in a handful of less-than-pleasant realities across the multiverse, Fink decided to use the Chargers to encourage sales, placing them under his protection with the strict promise to Comstock that they would be kept in line. Unfortunately, the Chargers wanted to expand their numbers, and were not content to wait for people to start buying the Vigor of their own accord. Many went so far as to take up employment as salesmen just for the chance to shill Charge to the masses – much to Jeremiah Fink's delight. Sadly, the Chargers were never renowned for their patience, and eventually took to stealing large quantities of the Vigor and dispersing it by any means available to them: throughout this time, posters warning children not to accept gifts from "the flying strangers" became almost as popular as warnings against the False Shepherd.

Less successful were the Founders' attempts to prevent the Chargers from distributing the Vigor in Finkton, where the downtrodden workers were once again eager for anything that might offer them an escape from poverty and servitude. Despite the best efforts of the Founders' air force to keep the slums free of these flying recruiters, the Chargers often proved too quick to intercept… and those of them who were captured proved too fast, too powerful and too troublesome to remain in captivity for very long. Doubly unfortunately, though the Chargers often found the Vox Populi too serious to make them a permanent part of their selfish games above Columbia, they weren't above working together if they needed to.

As such, it wasn't long before Fink was forced to account for his mistake: beforehand, the errors the crooked industrialist had made were easily eliminated, concealed or harnessed for the good of the company: after all, few of the civilian Vigor junkies could fly, and those who _could_ were usually too enthralled in their own introspective madness to avoid being captured until it was too late.

With Charge, the chaos was almost uncontrollable… and as the symptoms of Vigor consumption began to accelerate, the Chargers' thrillseeking behaviour slowly degenerated into an impatient, almost desperate need for stimulation, no matter how violent or perverse: in turn, their crimes escalated from enthusiastic corruption of public morals to theft, sexual assault, murder, and even industrial sabotage. What little dregs of empathy remained soon degenerated into a childish, borderline-sociopathic denial of responsibility; immaturity warped into emotional regression, complete with temper tantrums, possessive fits, and helpless explosions of giggling. Fortunately, the Neverlanders lacked the calculating, malignant intellects of the Preachers of the Way or the all-obliterating psychosis of the Hellions and Clowns… but given the speed and rapaciousness the Chargers possessed, that proved to be the smallest blessing of all.

Comstock was _not_ pleased.

Because of Fink's failure to anticipate the problems his new wonder-product had caused, a devastating crime wave had been unleashed upon the streets of Columbia, unencumbered by sky-lines, airships and even city limits; dozens upon dozens of formerly upstanding citizens had been converted into Chargers, and many of the labourers on which the city depended to survive now had the perfect means of escaping to the Sodom below. By official decree, Charge was not only removed from the civilian market, but from military usage as well: every last stockpile of the Vigor was destroyed and the formula incinerated. Unfortunately, several bottles went missing from the attempted recall; once several enterprising chemists on Fink MFG's payroll went the same way, it wasn't long before the Vox-allied Chargers had a means of producing their own bootleg Vigor.

For the first time in the history of the company, Jeremiah Fink was forced to issue a grovelling public apology to Comstock, not only for creating a form of Vigor junkie that was almost impossible to corral or control, not only for inadvertently giving the Vox a powerful new weapon, but for the cardinal sin of _embarrassing_ the Founders. In these timelines, Comstock seriously considered having Fink assassinated and replaced by someone less ambitious; indeed, when the revolution began, the Prophet spied a golden opportunity to eliminate the troublesome robber baron under the guise of Vox Populi terrorism, and ordered a hitman to intercept Fink before he could escape his private sanctum.

However, constants once again won out over variables, and Daisy Fitzroy got there first – aided by an honour guard of Chargers, fittingly enough.

* * *

Military branded-chargers were not common in mainstream Columbia, and like the Preachers, Final Judgements and Lightning Rods before them, they were only adopted in very specific timelines. This time, though, it wasn't the violence of an early Vox Populi revolution that triggered the creation of the elite Charge-users, but an industrial disaster known simply as the Drift.

In 1911, a freak storm erupted over Comstock's paradise, bombarding the city streets with some of the most destructive weather it had seen in its existence: in the overwhelming majority of realities across the possibility space, Columbia's tried and tested atmospheric bubble took the brunt of the onslaught, absorbing most of the lightning strikes and limiting the destruction that ensued to what little the bubble couldn't keep out. In total, the city only suffered a handful of casualties and a smattering of property damage, most of it caused by melon-sized hailstones and the occasional airship crash. The city endured, moved on, and nothing changed as a result.

In a few realities, though, astronomical coincidence worked against the city. In these worlds, on this date, both the robber baron and the Prophet had been attempting to construct a powerful new variant on the original Lutece portal atop Comstock House, fuelled by the vast generators that kept the fortress running. Each of them had their own reasons for this experiment: Fink wanted a more stable gateway, hoping that it would grant him access to a wider swathe of the possibility space than ever before – along all the technology he could plagiarize from it; and Comstock wanted to ensure that I could receive the same "prophetic visions" he had, but without the carcinogenic side-effects that had aged him so dramatically.

In another display of the arrogance that had descended on him in his last years of life, Fink ordered the technicians to activate the portal at the very moment the storm swept over them, believing that Comstock House's defences would be enough to protect the experiment from the weather. Unfortunately, the new portal used far more power than anyone had anticipated, and the resulting strain on the fortress pushed its internal systems to their very limits: the Lutece Field generators remained functional, but for two heart-stopping minutes, the atmospheric bubble failed and left everyone on the roof of Comstock House exposed to the storm – not to mention the rarefied altitude at which Columbia sat. Within seconds, everyone on the rooftop was dead, and nobody was left alive to shut down the experiment; from the safety of the rooftop domes, Comstock and Fink could only watch as hailstones shattered the control relays, bolts of lightning destabilized the Tear, and hurricane force winds tore the entire portal apart, sending a massive shockwave rippling out across the city.

Over the course of the next few days, the Lutece Field generators around the city began behaving very oddly as the effects of the shockwave set in. Though none of them broke down or even failed to exert the proper lift, engineers couldn't fail to notice that the generators were now gravitating horizontally instead of simply hovering, subtly forcing the city in opposite directions. Nothing could be done to stop it: even manually directing the mobile buildings and neighbourhood together no longer worked, for every time the technicians managed to anchor one structure to another, the Lutece fields once again began to drag them away, until even the strongest docking clamps shattered under the strain. Only completely replacing the affected generators was enough to end the problem, and this usually required several dozen airships to ensure that the district remained in the air while the technicians went to work, and with Columbia's fleet stretched to its limit in providing aid for disaster-stricken districts, this service was available only to a rare few areas of the city – most prominently, Comstock House, Finkton and (of course) Monument Island.

Bit by bit, each district of the city began to drift further and further apart, until the once-mighty Columbia was reduced to a scattered chain of islands floating aimlessly across the sky. Worse still, the districts continued drifting further with every passing day, until only a combination of manual relocation and artificial cloud cover kept them from straying into the sight of the Sodom Below.

While the scattered districts struggled to adapt their purely ornamental gardens to agricultural production, the Founder's airfleet went about the near-constant business of shipping supplies, equipment and labourers to ensure the survival of the disconnected city. Meanwhile, Comstock House travelled freely across the skies, transmitting sermons and "miracles" to every district it visited, maintaining control over sundered Columbia through demagogic force of personality. Monument Island followed close behind, for the Prophet was never willing to let me stray very far from his sight. As for Finkton, it remained at work wherever the robber baron pleased, sometimes straying close to the Sodom Below in order to directly profit from its resources, sometimes following Comstock's lead in distributing its own wealth to the beleaguered citizens of this new airborne archipelago.

Had it not been for the state of disorder that followed this initial cataclysm, the Vox Populi threat might have ended then and there. With airships now being of vital importance to Columbia's disintegrating infrastructure, security at the docks had been escalated to almost comical extremes: Fink himself was not content until roughly there was a Handyman on duty at every single port in his domain, and countless other districts simply refused to even accept Black or Irish technicians on the grounds that they might be Vox-aligned; white reformers and sympathizers never even got that far, most of them being lynched in the initial carnage. But during the initial chaos of the Drift, the need for troops to control the worst-affected regions left several critical gaps in normal security, and the Vox Populi were able to steal several ships from Finkton docks and use them to retrieve as many refugees as they could carry them. By the time anyone was able to stop the flood of refugees, Daisy Fitzroy and almost three hundred Vox operatives had left Columbia, taking with them a small fleet of transports, freighters, gunships, air frigates… and one of Fink's prototype factory vessels.

Through a mixture of piracy, creative genius and sheer good luck, Daisy was able to find sufficient resources in the world below to keep their factory running at peak capacity, and month after they had left Columbia, the Vox returned in force. Though well-armed, they still didn't have sufficient numbers to tackle the full might of the Founders' own holy airfleet, but Daisy knew full well that they didn't need to. Instead, she waged a war of attrition, conducting multiple lightning raids on districts vital to Columbia's continued functioning, stealing supplies and recruiting fresh Vox from the servants of Founder households. With Comstock's air-force stretched too thin in supplying the other scattered islands of the city, they often arrived too late to make much difference to the situation. Before long, the situation grew so dire that Songbird was summoned to help deal with the crisis; but though he was able to overtake and destroy Vox frigates with contemptible ease, a narrowly-thwarted bomb plot at Monument Island ultimately forced Comstock to return Songbird to his regular duties, shelving his one major advantage.

The Founders were desperate for any solution to the disaster, no matter how outlandish, and Fink eventually found it in one of his long-discarded wonder products: recalling the powers of permanent flight and enhanced speed that the Chargers had demonstrated in the later stages of their addiction, Fink arranged for several test subjects to be at once force-fed and bathed in the Charge Vigor, with industrial pumps forcing the mutagenic elixir directly into their digestive tracts and specially-designed chemical tanks suffusing their bodies with purified Vigor.

To the surprise of all, Fink followed this up by taking strict precautions to keep his newfound troops under control – grotesque and downright monstrous precautions, but precautions nonetheless. As it happened, the robber baron hadn't forgotten the castigation he'd earned in the wake of the last Charger outbreak, and even _he_ wasn't reckless enough to grant his newest pawns access to such power without guaranteeing their loyalty. So, while they were still unconscious following their final dose of Charge, medical professionals on loan from Comstock House went to work on the brains of the test subjects, performing the kind of operations that Comstock himself would have never let them perform on me. As a result, the newly-created Charge-specialists were rendered down to the intellectual level of children, their capacity for autonomous thought and action all but destroyed. Now dependent on the guidance of the Founders for survival, they quickly learned to follow Comstock's orders without hesitation, for any indecision on their part was immediately rewarded with a jab from a cattle prod.

Called "Cherubs" for their supposedly angelic servitude to the Prophet – not to mention their childlike sense of innocence – these specialists were outfitted with baroque suits of gold-painted armour, hauntingly beautiful masks modelled on the faces of child, and lightweight ornamental wings, the better to impress upon observers the divine power that Comstock still commanded (and to hide the scars left by the surgery).

However, though they played their part in keeping the citizens of the floating isles in line through propaganda, their true role lay in combat, for the Cherubs were to be the Founders' shock troops in the new archipelago of the skies: their ability to fly allowed them to travel across the skies independent of airships, and their speed allowed them to easily overtake even the fastest of Vox ships. For good measure, Fink was eventually able to produce these aerial combatants in batches of a hundred at a time every week, ensuring military superiority even in the rare situations in which the Vox Populi were able to outgun their attackers.

Unfortunately, precious cargo still had to travel between islands, and though both the Cherubs and the Founder fleet did their part to keep the freighters protected, some ships found themselves flying alone: sacrificing the fastest but weakest of her own ragtag fleet to draw the attention of her enemies, Daisy Fitzroy lured the Cherubs away with a hunt for the fleeing outriders and kept Comstock's air-force preoccupied with lightning raids on Finkton, while her own fleet descended on a shipment of newly-produced Vigor leaving Monument Island.

Soon, the Vox Populi had Cherubs of their own – twitchy, addled from Vigor overdose and fiercely independent without the constraints of brain surgery, but more than enough to slowly even the odds. Unlike the other Vigor specialists across Columbia, there were no defectors to the Vox among the Cherubs, for their conditioning was almost impossible to break; instead, they were simply eliminated and replaced by their Vox counterparts.

With security so distracted by all the lightning raids across Columbia, it wasn't long before Daisy's operatives were eventually able to infiltrate the slums of Finkton and begin preaching to the workers trapped there – and this time, they did not speak as agents of a desperate resistance movement outmatched by the Founders at every turn, but as the voice of a movement that could stand as an equal to Comstock's zealots. Furthermore, with all the difficulties keeping the city fed, policed and connected, the Founders simply didn't have the time to find the Vox factory ship: left undisturbed in its position deep within the Sierra Nevadas, the airborne manufactory continued churning out armaments, equipment and airships by the ton, patiently awaiting the day when the war of attrition could finally erupt into an apocalyptic conflagration.

It was into these war-torn skies that Booker DeWitt ascended in 1912. By then, the New Garden of Eden had been swept away by the Drift, and even if it had been there to accept Booker's pod, the visitor centre had been fully converted into a monastic training ground for Comstock's civilian militia, and was in no condition to receive guests. Indeed, I recall that in some iterations of this particular journey, Booker and I were later forced to seek out information on my powers from one of the priests in residence at this unearthly temple, and the search quickly proved to be the bloodiest challenges we had faced yet – even before Preacher Witting attempted to "baptise" us by using a Lutece portal to open a Tear to Rapture.

Whatever the case, Booker found himself ejected into empty air, and would have descended all the way back to the ground had the Cherubs not found him: recognizing an intruder in their airspace, they tore his pod apart and plucked Booker from the fuselage, dragging him back to Columbia for interrogation. It wasn't long before Comstock's forces discovered that they'd captured the False Shepherd, but in their eagerness to provide news of their victory to the Prophet, they grew lax – and Booker was able to break free of his cell.

With most of the skylines torn apart by the Drift, airships too well-secured to pilot and stowing away almost impossible, Booker's first Vigor in this reality was Charge. However, though the dimensional transfusion that had brought him to the lighthouse allowed him to maintain his powers on a permanent basis, it didn't grant him the extended range of abilities: for that, he had to keep drinking.

Worse still, even transfusion was not enough to save him from the side effects of this particular Vigor: there were limits even to Booker's hard-won immunity, and Charge proved too much for him to withstand; the energies of the Vigor's home reality were simply too powerful for even transfused individuals (albeit for reasons that did not become apparent until I got a good look at the Luteces' notes). Charge brought Booker down to the same level as the rest of Columbia. In most worlds of the possibility space, this wouldn't have been a problem, for we only obtained Charge during the Vox Populi revolution, towards the end of our journey. In the world of the Drift, though, navigation and travel were far more difficult for those attempting to operate in secret, and addiction had more than enough time to set in.

By the time he finally reached Monument Island, Booker was already mentally dependent on Charge. Fortunately, he had not begun to demonstrate the exuberant psychopathy of the Chargers, but even without that, our attempted escape from Columbia was a thousand times more arduous than it had been before. His need to satisfy his addiction only gave the Founders more time to move against us, and all too often left us trapped in a district with the Cherubs hunting for us… but even if we did make it to the edge of Columbian airspace, Songbird was always waiting to ambush us.

In the end, we were reduced to hiding in the derelict buildings of a near-abandoned district known only as Penitent Isle. Formerly known as Exaltation Heights, this place had been one of the most eligible pieces of real estate in the entire city, a home of the Founders' most fashionable and elegant citizens; in the wake of the Drift, though, its warped Lutece Field always carried it further from the heart of the archipelago than any other district, and eventually its populace began fleeing the area in droves. In their absence, it became a dumping ground for the embarrassments and failures of Columbia, and all other members of the Founders who'd been spared jail or execution – but not a life in shameful exile on the fringes of society. Once Finkton recognized its potential as a place nobody would ever care about, the district also became a dumping ground for experiments too sensitive to be consigned to the Sodom Below but too resilient to be destroyed.

Unfortunately, because nobody bothered to maintain the district's vital mechanisms, Penitent Isle was left perpetually on the verge of plummeting from the sky; as a result, supply ships barely deigned to airdrop food parcels, the military refused to station a garrison, and even the Vox avoided the crumbling neighbourhood like the plague. After all, they weren't that desperate.

Booker and I, however, _were_.

On Penitent Isle, amidst the sparse population and the multitude of ruined buildings, the two of us struggled to find some means of escaping my old protector's wrath, chasing down leads amidst the refuse piles of Fink MFG and fighting with the other scavengers for supplies. It was uphill work, even before Tear activity turned most of the exiles into merged nightmares, for Booker's condition escalated with every day we spent in the shadows. During the night, I could just about keep his addiction fed by stealing bottles of Charge from other realities, but in the day, personality degradation began to show: with the glorious morning sky overhead and his growing instinct to fly now unable to ignore it, staying on the ground brought him immeasurable pain, and even though he knew that flying would only draw the attention of the Founders, the urge to embrace his powers was almost impossible to resist. For hours on end, he was left clawing at the ground, sweating and shivering and grinding his teeth as he struggled to keep himself from succumbing to his _need_ to fly. I tried to help him, tried to comfort him in spite of his worsening temper, but there was only so much I could do while we were still trapped in the district.

As luck would have it, it wasn't the Founders who finally located us when Booker's self-control briefly snapped, but the Vox. As before, they wanted us to locate Chen Lin, but this time for his knowledge of Jeremiah Fink's industrial palace: in this reality, he'd been sentenced to a long stint of indentured servitude as the robber baron's personal gunsmith prior to ending up in the cellars of the Good Time Club. This time, the Vox offered to help Booker bring down Songbird – and this time, they manacled with an explosive collar to keep him from flying off once he accepted the bargain. On the upside, they also gave him his own suit of Cherub armour, just to make a little easier.

But of course, it wasn't easy, for even in dimensions that have strayed so far beyond the recognizable mainstream, some constants still remain: once again, I was forced to mess around with Tears in order to save the gunsmith; once again, the Vox turned on us at the peak of their rebellion; once again, I was forced to stab Daisy to death – this time to stop her from triggering Booker's collar. And once again, Columbia descended into even deeper madness.

This time, Booker nearly followed it over the edge. By then, he was a fully-fledged Neverlander, barely capable of interacting with human beings, clinging to the remnants of his empathy by a thread and taking every opportunity to spread his addiction further; to this day, few things in the multiverse frighten me quite as much as the sound of Booker _giggling_ in the throes of juvenile bloodlust. I still remember hearing him cackle and shriek with joy as he mowed through a crowd of fleeing civilians, still remember seeing the look of sneering annoyance on his face as he gunned down a woman pleading for mercy… and worst of all, I remember watching the gruff, unpolished but kind man I'd once known slowly degenerate into a childish, uncaring brute.

Only I was spared his wrath; even though he didn't know who I was and couldn't remember his daughter anyway thanks to dimensional transfusion, instinct won out over his conscious mind, and he still found himself caring for me even as his behaviour swung towards the psychopathic. In the end, though, it was his own speed that was almost his undoing: when Songbird captured me, Booker was able to pursue him much faster than he would have on foot – and my protector's riposte nearly killed him. Only the Luteces were able to save him, patching up his wounds and providing him with jury-rigged medications to stabilize his personality, eventually leading to Booker pursuing once again and being flung forward into the Reign of the Lamb by my future self.

Here, in a Columbia that had finally been reunited under the tyrannical guidance of the Lamb, Booker once again found himself facing the many horrors that had been brought into existence in the workshops of Comstock House. Unfortunately, this version of my father was able to go places that his other incarnations across the multiverse weren't, and thanks to his Charge-induced recklessness, this led him on a journey into the asylum's darkest laboratories – and into contact with monsters that turned even Booker's stomach.

Here, he saw how the Boys of Silence were born: the grisly procession of orphaned children being dragged to the portals and made to kneel before them, their heads positioned just over the lip of the Tears; the last terrified screams, then the very moment of decapitation when the Tear slammed shut, leaving their heads to tumble aimlessly across the possibility space for all eternity; and at last, the purpose-built helmet being forced over their bloodied stumps, enforcing nascent interdimensional connections that would have otherwise faded into death, preserving the mind of the victim – forever.

Doubly unfortunately, though his powers often gave him the edge needed to escape the labs, several incarnations of Booker were Booker was captured while leaving the area – and met a fate almost as grim as that of the Boys. More than once, the dutiful surgeons of Comstock House decided that since the mysterious intruder was already possessed of all the necessary gifts and even most of the armour, it was only right that they complete his transformation into a Cherub. Thus, with their individuality scythed away, versions of Booker such as these were to spend the remainder of their lives enforcing the Founders' despotic rule over the Purified Sodom.

But as astonishing as it seems, there were _worse_ things that happened to Booker in this timeline.

In his attempt to escape from the labs, at least one Booker ended up losing control in the narrow hallways and accidentally colliding with one of the open portals: now adrift in an endless ocean of possibilities, my father tumbled aimlessly across the infinite, lost in the interdimensional labyrinth and unable to find his way back to his reality of origin (or what he _thought_ was his reality of origin). Time in the Sea of Doors is nonlinear, disconnected from the chronological passage common to the realms within the possibility space, so I have no idea how long Booker spent trying to find his way back to the world he knew, to find some way of rescuing me. By the time he finally made his way out of the tangle of interconnected paths and found a Door that appeared to lead back to Columbia, a combination of unfed addiction, Vigor-induced mental decay and sheer loneliness had driven him into the murkiest depths of insanity… but his journey across the multiverse had finally broken through the shell of false recollections and cognitive dissonance hiding his true memories: he could finally remember Anna DeWitt – and at last realized who _I_ really was.

When he fell through the Tear and landed back in Columbia, he was sobbing Anna's name, begging for forgiveness. Unfortunately, the wrong people heard him as he lay sprawled across the cobblestones.

Booker hadn't ended up in the world he'd known: he'd ended up in another Columbia – _in the year 1898._

Worse still, though he was eventually able to make a beeline for Monument Island in a desperate attempt to rescue me (or at least the version of me imprisoned in this dimension), the complex had full complement of security guards at this time; as such, his attempts to break in through the statue's scalp were barred by a squadron of gunships. I was still half-asleep when Booker arrived at the Tower that morning, and given that I was barely five years old at the time, I was easily convinced that what I'd glimpsed had been nothing more than a dream… but I still remembered the sight of my father, resplendent in his Cherub's armour and gleaming silver wings, hovering just outside the library window, trying to reach out to me. But that vivid memory always ended with the security shutters closing and the sound of my would-be rescuer being hauled away by the Founders echoing across the library: I never saw him again.

Now, however, the dead histories of Columbia are an open book to me, and I know that I was wrong.

Scant hours after being arrested and incarcerated at Comstock House, Booker was selected for an experimental program that had obliterated all previous test subjects in pursuit of the perfect protector. And the reason for Booker's selection? Well, his power of flight was one qualifying aspect in the eyes of Jeremiah Fink's scientists, but poetic justice had been the true deciding factor: Comstock knew his other self at a glance, and thought it appropriate that one False Shepherd would be made to serve as a guardian against another Antichrist when he finally arrived.

Deep in the chthonic laboratories hidden beneath Finkton, Booker was remade. Bones were replaced with near-unbreakable alloy prosthetics; muscles were expanded to monstrous proportions, their strength enhanced through pneumatic pistons and improbably subtle mechanisms stolen from countless disparate realities; his skin was fused with a custom-designed impact-resistant weave, making him almost invulnerable to harm. His digestive tract, sensory apparatus, circulatory system, and even his skull were simply removed: in their place, the scientists installed a highly-efficient fuel-fed generator, sophisticated audio-visual processors, cardiovascular pumping system, and even a custom-built helmet to house his brain. He was even outfitted with a miniature Lutece Field generator, to amplify the strength of his newly-equipped wings.

And under the helmet, Booker's mind was expunged: his impulses, emotions, drives, memories, thought processes, even the most basic elements of his personality were all slowly flensed from his psyche and replaced by specially-designed implants designed to substitute for the pieces of his brain that the surgeons amputated. Derived from the same process used to create the Big Daddies of Rapture, ancillary techniques plagiarized from dozens of other worlds had made this operation a thousand times more insidious, removing all that was weak, sinful and _human_ from my father's psyche and replacing it with a depth of focussed rage and obsession that even the normally quiescent Big Daddies could not have managed. In the end, all that remained of Booker Dewitt were the elements that would allow him to coordinate his flight powers, and the memory of his love for me.

And in the end, even Fink's programming corrupted that as well.

So it was that in this universe, Booker Dewitt, Charger, Cherub and Pinkerton agent, became _Songbird_.

And sad to say, he was only one of many possible origins for my faithful protector, one thread of the grisly patchwork of tragedies that comprised Songbird's life - before Booker and I finally erased it along with the rest of Columbia.

* * *

As with all the Vigors' worlds of origin, information on Charge's birthplace is sketchy and often limited to what the Luteces could observe through the Tears they conjured. However, the dimension that eventually became known as the Leper's Playground exceeded even these expectations.

When Rosalind and Robert opened a Tear to the dimension from which this newest Vigor phenomena had been born from, they found themselves greeted only by an endless vista of featureless grey static. Immediately sceptical, the Luteces tried again, hoping that they had merely hit some form of interdimensional interference; however, the static refused to clear.

Faced with a seemingly unsolvable mystery, the two nonetheless refused to give up: drawing on the same bottomless reservoir of obstinacy that had sustained them through their long years of lone research – and would one day fuel their attempts to end the threat of Columbia – they recalibrated their machines, refined their instruments, amplified Tear cohesion a thousandfold, and spent most of their days clad in the lead safety gear that had become the hallmark of their experiments in the wake of Comstock's unfortunate diagnosis.

Eventually, on midnight of the thirteenth day, Rosalind fell asleep at her desk... and awoke to the sound of her instruments finally unveiling what lay beyond the Tear: her view of this world lasted for barely forty-eight hours and could never be recaptured again after that, but the laboratory cameras recorded every moment of it.

The world of Charge was not a natural environment at all, but a seemingly infinite landscape of garish colours, plush cushioned floors, deep lakes of saccharine nectar, and shining cities weirdly reminiscent of carnival rides – all luxuriating beneath a sky as pale and featureless as a sheet of paper. No sun or stars disturbed the firmament, nor did night ever interrupt the perpetual glow from above; no flora or fauna could be found anywhere, only flat cushioned surfaces and landmasses too smooth to be natural formations. Indeed, the more Rosalind looked, the more she was convinced she'd stumbled upon some kind of planet-sized funfair: music echoed softly across the horizon, carnivalesque melodies sounding from hidden speakers dotted about the unending plain; ethereal firework displays were projected upon vast padded cliff-faces, dyeing the already-luridly tinted world with a thousand unspeakable shades of neon colour; and from the pallid sky, food periodically rained in bewildering showers of fruit, vegetables, sweetmeats and confectionary – to be immediately feasted upon by the residents of this strange, disturbingly saccharine world.

And said residents made their presence known almost immediately, emerging from the padded eyries atop the cliffs and descending upon the grounds like a plague of locusts: gorging themselves upon the food, playing upon the carnival rides, quaffing gluttonously from the nectar lakes, dancing to the music in delirious fits, watching enthralled as the lightshows flickered across the cliffs, and playing gleefully in the colourless skies above it all. They raced each other from horizon to horizon, brawled at supersonic speed across the padded mountain ranges, bombarded one another with ludicrously childish insults, and fucked for hours on end in every single venue this strange world had to offer. For twenty-four hours, they played unceasingly, giggling constantly and obnoxiously, barely touching the ground unless they absolutely had to, never showing the slightest amount of remorse for the injuries they inflicted upon one another over the course of their games; then, they returned to their eyries and slept, set to repeat the bacchanal the next day.

The residents were, of course, all Chargers – but not of any kind the Luteces would recognize. From what little conversations Rosalind was able to overhear amidst the unceasing avalanche of laughter and insults, they'd contracted both their powers and their ongoing mental regression from a being they knew only as "Mama." Some mentioned being forced to leave "topside" by those who didn't want them to spread Mama's gift further, and others claimed that this was secretly what Mama had wanted all along, for it would allow them another way of sending her gifts "down all the paths and through all the doors."

More curious was the other name they gave Mama: Kalumbiah, the winged lady.

However, it wasn't until the sky _opened_ that Rosalind finally realized what this place really was: if a fight among the residents ever spiralled out of control, or one of them happened to fall ill, the ashen firmament parted like the Red Sea to reveal a colossal glass roof, over ten feet thick and reinforced so thoroughly that none of the residents would have been able to escape even if they knew it was there (for Chargers at this advanced stage of degeneration often believed that if they couldn't actually see something, it wasn't really present). And visible clearly through the glass was an audience that the Chargers referred to only as "the doctors." As Rosalind watched, bolts of searing electricity split the air, forcing the residents into compliance as mechanisms in the roof dragged the ill or injured Chargers away.

This world was an underground prison – an asylum, really – for those suffering from an affliction that formed the basis of Charge. As soon as an infected individual was detected aboveground, they would be apprehended and delivered to this vast subterranean playground where they could indulge their demented whims upon one another without endangering the healthy populace, all while a small army of psychologists, physicians and other specialists observed them from on high.

And though the wardens did their best to keep their patients from serious harm, every now and again a Charger died, whereupon their bodies were quietly deposited in a deep pit on the outskirts of the playground; from what little Rosalind was able to learn, this mass grave was the only safe means of corpse disposal available to the wardens, for communicability rates of the Charge disease accelerated as decay set in, rendering even cremation an unacceptable risk. For good measure, the pit was sealed beneath a shatterproof glass dome, granting the inmates a free show and preventing additional contagions from infecting the Charger community.

Unfortunately, it was in the mass grave that the Tears opened, allowing the disease a toehold in the bodies of those exposed to the Vigor phenomena – diluted in comparison to the original power of Kalumbiah's gift, but more than enough to continue the spread of the plague in new and unexpected ways.

In the end, what ultimately prompted Rosalind to end her observation of the Leper's Playground was the realization that, while she had been watching the inmates and the doctors that policed them, someone else had been watching _her._

Halfway through the final hour of her time spent peering into the portal, she happened to notice one of the Chargers scrawling a message on one of the nearby cliffs: "PEEKABOO," it read. "WE SEE YOU TOO, ROSIE. KALUMBIAH SEES ALL. BEST HOPE COMSTOCK DOESN'T SEE YOU TOO."

And as the other Chargers gathered around the graffiti in fascination, Rosalind Lutece hastily shut down the machine… but not before she got a split-second glimpse of something floating in the clouds above the playground – something that looked uncannily like an eye…

* * *

A/N: Up next - Undertow!


	8. Undertow

A/N: Happy New Year, ladies and gentlemen! A hearty thank-you to all my viewers, reviewers, favouriters and followers!

 **Xzeihoranth,** thanks as always for reviewing; granted, I'm pretty sure the content's always a bit messed-up and disturbing... and I think this chapter might just continue the trend! Thanks again!

 **Anon...** your review might just be one of the best reviews I've received in a long time; thank you so much for all your kind words. Yes, Murder of Crows was the concept that made me go "okay, Plasmids can't do that," too. Bee Swarm at least shows you developing an apparatus for _growing_ the swarm, and that's admittedly pretty out there, but not as crazy as literally ejecting crows from... ahem, nowhere; the same goes for the crap mentioned on Fink's concept board ("Resurrect dead pets?" Come on, we've already seen Tears bring people back from the dead, but we've never seen it done with Plasmids). Also, I'm thinking of an additional chapter that displays some Vigors that never made it into the mainstream - might be short, but you never know... anyway, thanks so much for your review, and I hope you like this latest chapter!

So, without further ado, Undertow! Read, review, and above all, enjoy!

Disclaimer: _Bioshock Infinite_ is not mine, and neither are those hidden references...

* * *

Undertow was an outlier, an improbable rarity among the Vigor product line: among other things, it wasn't actually created with combat applications in mind, nor did it arrive on the civilian market after a stint in Columbia's military – quite the reverse, in fact. Most extraordinary of all, it was not devised as another one of Jeremiah Fink's blockbusters, but was actually _specifically requested_ for the sake of the public good. Alongside the likes of Murder of Crows and Charge, it appeared almost boring, but its utility value made it one of the most valuable of all the Vigors to be found in Columbia's iterations across the Probability Space. It even found a permanent place in the offices of Fink MFG as a replacement for fire extinguishers, much to the robber-baron's embarrassment.

All things considered, Fink would have been more than happy to discard the concept of Undertow in favour of more ostentatious Vigors: as far as he could see, hydrokinesis was extremely limited in terms of military applications, having little immediate lethality and not much potential for torture; surely no general would pay the king's ransom he'd come to expect from his dealings with the military. And though he had witnessed the sheer pressure that Undertow was able to exert in live fire exercises, he still doubted it could be of any use unless some unfortunate Vox terrorist had to be thrown to their death – hardly a guarantee in the cramped quarters of the Finkton shantytowns. Fixated upon the successes of Fontaine Futuristics as he was, Jeremiah Fink could not imagine a power that amounted to little more than "a bucket of cold water to the face" on the streets of Rapture and barely bothered to countenance the idea of it on the streets of Columbia. So, less than a day after the Vigor's first test demonstrations, he declined to offer his stamp of approval and instead consigned Undertow's formula to the company vaults.

For several months, these documents were left gathering dust as the rest of Columbia swiftly progressed onwards into steadily darker futures – stricter, harsher, crueller, but never wiser. For once, Fink proved more or less correct in his assessment of the Vigor's military uses: nobody needed a power of Undertow's calibre in the struggle against the Vox Populi, not when guns, bombs, airships and the more commonplace Vigors were more than equal to the task. And in the end, it wasn't the military that called for Undertow at all, but a civilian authority.

As with any city across the possibility space, readily-accessible water was an essential commodity for Columbia; unlike most cities, however, Columbia hadn't been built on the banks of a river or within reach of an underground reservoir, and its access to water wasn't always guaranteed. As with many resources required by Comstock's utopia, sources could be improvised: in much the same way that crops could be cultivated in the "glass palaces" of Idyllia District, rain and condensation could be gathered through special collection plants atop the highest spires of the city, and ice could be obtained from outside Columbia's protective atmosphere. However, most of the time, the easiest way to obtain food and water was to steal it from the Sodom Below: just as airborne raiding parties would regularly pillage undefended farms across the world and ambush cargo freighters crossing the Atlantic, Columbian tankers would frequently siphon lakes, claim undiscovered wells in little-frequented countries, and steal whole icebergs if need be.

But even this wasn't enough to satisfy the demands of Columbia's plumbing, especially given the city's refusal to institute limitations or taxes on excessive water usage. As the battle between the Founders and the Vox Populi began to accelerate, fires became increasingly frequent throughout the city: factories were bombed, airships crashed in residential areas, munitions stockpiles went up in smoke, shipments of Devil's Kiss exploded in mid-flight, brawls between Firemen and Heater-toting gunmen spiralled out of control, and sometimes, Tears opened on planet-spanning infernos just long enough to spill their native environment all over the surrounding area.

With all the uncontrollable blazes raging across the city, Columbia's beleaguered Fire Department could not afford to waste precious water on extinguishing the flames. So, as good citizens, they begged Father Comstock for aid; having no overwhelming desire to see his city burn, he complied. Not only did the Prophet supply the various branches of the department with additional manpower, but he also specifically requested that Fink MFG provide a solution to the problem – at his own expense. For once eager for a cost-effective solution to this newfound problem, Jeremiah plucked the formula to Undertow from the archives and supplied the firefighters with eight hundred bottles of Hydrokinetic Vigor.

Undertow proved immediately effective in extinguishing house fires, quickly eclipsing commonplace firefighting equipment in sheer efficaciousness: not only was Undertow able to exert more pressure and convey more water than even the best hoses, but the Vigor required no local source of water in order to work – to the firefighters, it simply conjured the precious water from nowhere. Properly applied, a single volunteer armed with Undertow could extinguish in minutes blazes that could have only been suppressed in hours. Impressed by the results, the firefighters recommended the Vigor be made part of the department's official equipment, and soon, Undertow was in use all over the city – with particular priority given to districts where the dreaded Firemen were on patrol.

Of course, some drawbacks remained. Among the most prominent were the immediate side-effects of imbibing the concoction: across the hands of the users, gaping octopus suckers erupted open like fleshy craters, pulsating sickeningly before their eyes; in some cases, webs of translucent skin began to grow between their fingers, granting them a distinctly amphibious appearance; and before long, their skin itself began to turn a rich crimson hue. And though these misgivings were easily overlooked given that the initial "hallucinations" were largely painless and over in a matter of seconds anyway, the firefighters soon noticed these deformities manifesting in reality as they used their newfound powers, and began to complain again. However, Vigor ultimately proved to be its own solution: firefighters grew addicted, necessity overrode complaints, and before long, the desperate public servants abandoned first their misgivings – and then their memory of them.

The Vigor-wielding firefighters earned immense praise from the citizenry of Columbia, particularly those who had been at risk of losing their homes and possessions, and many hailed Undertow as a truly divine gift – making it one of the few Vigors ever to truly live up to its longwinded sales pitches, much to the annoyance of Jeremiah Fink. The role of the fire department in combatting Vox sabotage became so integral that illustrated propaganda of the time often depicted the empowered firefighters as anthropomorphic rainstorms extinguishing the fire of the Vox Populi, and from this these particular Vigor-Junkies earned their most popular alias: "Downpours."

This popular image proved more literal than the cartoonists would have suspected, for in some cases, Downpours managed to arrive on the scene just in time to catch the arsonists in the act. It was in incidents such as these that the firefighters also discovered that Undertow was not limited to simply projecting high-pressure deluges of water: with an effort of will, they were able to remotely sculpt the water they summoned into tentacles, using them to bind Vox pyromaniacs in place long enough for the police to arrive to arrest them. Of course, spectators watching from the fringes of the blaze quickly formed into lynch mobs, and with encouragement from these baying crowds, some empowered firefighters went so far as to behead the captive Vox with their fire axes; more sadistic Downpours used their newly-developed tentacles to crush the arsonists to death – or drown them. Little if any punishment was levied against the Downpours for such acts of vigilante justice, especially as the crisis deepened and the revolution drew ever closer.

However, it was thanks to executions such as these that Undertow caught the attention of Comstock's generals, and Fink finally found an excuse to sell his product to the military: initially used in order to subdue and capture priority targets for later interrogation (and often in the interrogation itself), it was soon discovered that Undertow was not limited to sculpting tendrils, nor was it an exclusively nonlethal combat power; Downpours exposed to the Vigor for extended periods of time could direct the water they conjured into colossal tidal waves, shaping it on the fly into walls, cages, jaws, even entire buildings. With sufficient experience and expertise, adepts such as these could accelerate the pressure of the water violently to pulverize bone and rupture organs, or adjust its consistency until it solidified into gelatinous mounds large enough to swallow entire platoons. Unfortunately, the time needed to develop such abilities rendered the older Downpours a secret weapon at best, forcing the military to make do with Undertow's ability to bind and capture; worse still, the Vigors did not remain out of Vox Populi hands for long, and it wasn't long before Daisy Fitzroy was secretly creating Downpours of her own.

Next to Return To Sender, Undertow had the smallest release on the civilian market, in part due to the time it had spent being the sole property of the fire department. Nonetheless, once the military had finished toying with the possibilities they could engineer from the Vigor, Fink quickly set about marketing it for civilian use, emphasizing Undertow's impressive home defence capabilities and its utility about the house. For good measure, he also had the Vigor bottle's stopper made in the shape of an octopus tentacle, deliberately invoking the most famous combat technique of the Downpours as a means of enhancing sales.

Unfortunately, in his rush to increase profits across the board, he made a slight but rather embarrassing error in forgetting to mention the _nature_ of the water that Downpours could summon. As such, he soon found himself figuratively inundated with complaints from customers who'd tried to drink the water, householders who'd tried to water their plants with it, and prospective chefs who'd tried to cook with it – totally unaware that they were using _**saltwater**_. In a fit of pique, Fink once again made the company marketing department the scapegoat for his blunder, and once he was finished demoting and firing hapless employees from throughout the department, he quickly charged them with the creation of an improved advertising design. Unfortunately for him, clumsy marketing soon proved to be the least of Jeremiah Fink's problems.

As tensions increased throughout the city and terrorist attacks blossomed across Columbia, the Downpours of the fire department found themselves exercising their powers more and more as time went on, often requiring additional doses of Vigor and Salt to keep themselves properly fuelled for the task. As an unexpected side-benefit, many of them developed new and exciting facets to their powers: some channelled their hydrokinesis through the ground to create gigantic waterspouts; some were able to create enormous banks of fog in which to hide themselves and disorient fleeing arsonists; some learned to "fly" after a fashion by holding themselves aloft through powerful jets of water, allowing them to bypass obstacles and douse burning buildings from the air; a rare few even developed the ability to alter the composition of the human body with a single touch, their power liquefying their enemies in a matter of seconds.

Unfortunately, these new powers came at a cost, for it was around this time that the side-effects of Undertow became apparent: the physical distortion of the body was evident enough in the permanent manifestation of suckers, webbed fingers and scarlet-toned skin; some of the more extreme cases also developed gills, huge light-sensitive eyes, balding fin-tipped scalps, or even prehensile tentacles that sprouted from their armpits, knees and bellies. Many could not abide the open air and kept themselves permanently drenched through their powers to keep their skin from drying out, filling bathtubs and tanks with conjured seawater in which they could safely sleep; those who could not – or were prevented from doing so by well-meaning neighbours – died horribly.

The mental side-effects were no less gruesome, for as their physiological intolerance for life out of water expanded, the Downpours developed an increasingly alien perspective of the world around them: dry land became unnatural and oppressive to their changing senses, until even sunlight was too much for them to bear; human society, culture and even religion became difficult for them to accept, and many preachers could only watch as the most faithful of their flock abandoned their church for good; finally, the Downpours began to regard human life itself as distasteful, ugly and even frightening, and all too many regarded their own families with the deepest fear and disgust. However, unlike the Neverlanders, this never blossomed into attempts to force Undertow on unsuspecting civilians, nor did it drive them to fits of sociopathic violence like the Little Hellraisers; it simply engendered a profound disconnection between the Vigor Junkie and the rest of humanity, one that only compounded addiction by a need to remain mutated – to the point that some sufferers went so far as to flay themselves alive if they ever began manifesting human features again.

Indeed, this disconnect grew so great that Downpours eventually lost their ability to comprehend the fact that they had ever _been_ human: as far as they were concerned, they had always been aquatic beings transplanted from their home beneath the waves and kept imprisoned by "those without gills." Few of them felt any need to elaborate on this illusory past, instead simply insisting that "the signal has not been given for war," and that they had to "return to mother and worship her almightiness." In the end, they could not endure life on Columbia, and left by any means available to them: some simply vaulted over the railing and plunged to their deaths; others hijacked ships and flew them into the depths of the ocean; a few even attempted to sabotage the Lutece fields of Columbia's districts, all in a desperate attempt to liberate the few hundred Downpours incarcerated there.

In previous cases, Comstock and Fink had been able to conceal disastrous side-effects such as these through use of a well-organized police force and a highly-effective intelligence network (mundane, mechanical and Vigorous); unfortunately, by this stage in Columbia's history, the burgeoning crisis of the Vox Populi had left both the police and the military stretched far too thin to attend to wandering Vigor Junkies, and most of the city's spies were employed in trying to discover the whereabouts of Daisy Fitzroy. Even Fink's private security goons couldn't be spared, most of them being too preoccupied with keeping order at the factories to join the hunt. Worse still, as firefighters lauded and lionized throughout the city, the Downpours were in the public eye too often to be abducted. As such, when the firefighters began to mutate, everyone knew; when they degenerated into wild and "distinctly unchristian" madness, everyone knew… and when they began committing suicide, the people of Columbia knew about it long before Fink did.

Suddenly faced with a repetition of the Neverlander debacle and all the negative publicity that came with it, Fink quickly descended into a desperate spiral of excuses, failed propaganda, and desperate pleas for Father Comstock's assistance – of which he received none. Unfortunately, this once again played into the hands of the Vox Populi: for the time being, the Founders were too preoccupied with the scandal of Fink's ongoing fall from grace and the matter of how to replace the Downpours, just as Fink himself was too busy trying to craft excuses, and the Vox gleefully exploited this state of distraction to make final preparations for the now-inevitable day of reckoning.

As such, when the revolution finally began, it took the Founders by surprise: armed with the very best of Chen Lin's guns, bolstered by the fiery rhetoric of Daisy Fitzroy and empowered by the many Vigors that they had stolen over the past few weeks, the Vox Populi shock troops erupted out of the shantytowns in an overwhelming tide of vengeance and destruction. Within a matter of hours, Finkton proper was overtaken, and the factories were soon to follow – thanks in part to the Vigor Junkies that Daisy had secretly cultivated.

However, the Vox Downpours were not among the army who departed Finkton that day; instead, they remained behind in the factories, glutting themselves on Vigor and slowly converting Jeremiah Fink's fallen kingdom into something like the oceans that they obsessed over. Though still a thousand times more stable than the Founder Downpours, the notion of an underwater utopia still consumed them – not enough to drive them to jump from the parapets to their death, but more than enough to regard the polluted manufactoria and filth-shrouded shantytown slums with growing discontent. Descending deep into the bowels of the district, the Vigor-Junkies sought out the lowest point in the entire complex and began pouring water into the lower levels: working in tandem, they flooded Finkton from the bottom up, sculpting the water into barriers to prevent it from spilling beyond the boundaries the Downpours had set. Higher and higher the water level grew, until the executive offices slipped beneath the rising waves, and even the tower in which the CEO himself had died was lost beneath the growing dome of the newfound ocean.

Eventually, the once-mighty domain of Jeremiah Fink was reduced to a drowned city hovering aimlessly amidst the darkened clouds, a sunken metropolis of inert machinery, corroding industrial towers and the floating reefs of decomposed corpses – a self-contained world now populated only by the Downpours. Imprisoned within a gargantuan sphere of water, Finkton languished as the newfound paradise of the Undertow Addicts… until Booker and I finally erased Columbia from existence.

* * *

Because of the difficulties in turning garden-variety Downpours into effective soldiers, true Undertow specialists were not common across the possibility space: extensive doses of Vigor were needed to accelerate the user's powers to the point of immediate lethality, and the metal side-effects that soon followed often made the process a waste of time.

The latter point was a particularly difficult issue: normally, madness among Vigor Junkies was considered a potential upshot by Fink's researchers, if only because the common outpouring of psychopathy and demented wrath could actually be directed at the enemy; far from exploding with rage at their opponent, Downpours were more inclined to run in the opposite direction and swan-dive off the nearest railing. As such, all but the most determined and desperate creators abandoned the concept of a _true_ Undertow combat specialist, and only a rare few dimensions played host to creators and creations of this stripe.

In the realities in which such specialists had emerged, Columbia had found itself faced with a crisis of unprecedented proportions. In most timelines, the secrets of Rosalind Lutece's technology were kept under the watchful eye of Comstock and his inner circle, ensuring that no outsiders had ever learned the true details of how the city remained airborne – despite the best efforts of the government. However, in a rare few iterations, a few key papers were stolen from Rosalind's archives, eventually making their way into possession of the United States military; combined with a handful of airship wrecks salvaged from the ruins of Peking, they had everything they needed to create their own Lutece Field generators. So it was that, scarcely a decade after Columbia had seceded from the United States, the Sodom Below had a means of following its course across the skies.

Lulled by years of isolation and propaganda-fuelled arrogance, Columbia was caught almost completely off-guard when the first squadron of troop transports arrived in Emporia: together with an escort wing of attack craft, the American soldiers fought the Flying Squad almost to a standstill, destroyed almost two thirds of the airborne reinforcements, and very nearly succeeded in occupying the district; however, discipline and surprise could only carry the platoons so far, and the invaders soon found themselves overwhelmed when Columbia's elite troops arrived in force: between the pyrotechnic carnage of the Firemen, the teleporting, flesh-rending swarms of the Zealots, and the implacable strength of the Handymen, the mundane soldiers were exterminated to the last man.

Unfortunately, Columbia barely had enough time to lick its wounds, let alone celebrate this victory: the following week, another party of invaders arrived in the city, one larger and even better-equipped than the last. The week after that, another attack followed; then another; and another. Eventually, it became clear to Comstock that he'd gravely underestimated the Sodom Below: having suffered unimaginable damage to its international reputation thanks to Columbia's excesses across the globe, the United States was determined to erase its one-time champion at any cost, and thanks to the reverse-engineered Lutece Field tech, it might very well be capable of doing so. True, the Vigors and other technology that Fink had plagiarized from other dimensions proved almost impossible for the US military to combat and too exotic to reverse engineer (even after one raiding party returned with the body of a dead Zealot for autopsy); but in the end, these only delayed the inevitable.

For all its technological might and arcane powers, Columbia was just a city, and one now pitted against the political, industrial and military resources of an entire country; worse still, the threat that Comstock's utopia posed to the world at large meant that the United States had the support of almost every single nation large enough to support a functioning defence force, effectively uniting the entire _planet_ against Columbia. Without the dramatic expansion that would eventually take place during the Reign of the Lamb, defeating the Sodom Below was impossible, and artificial cloud cover could no longer be used to disguise the city's presence in the sky. So, in a matter of weeks after its assault had begun, Comstock ordered the city into a humiliating retreat in search of safe harbour.

But wherever the city went, its enemies were never far behind: as the Lutece Field technology spread from nation to nation, heavily-armed airfleets began springing up around the world, most of them crude in comparison to the gilded flotillas of Columbia, but still effective enough to fortify their borders against aerial intrusion. Britain was the first to join America in the sky, followed closely by Germany, France, and finally Russia. It was the Russian ascent that forced Columbia out of its refuge in the wildest regions of Siberia, eventually driving the Founders to consider more radical sanctuaries for their city; for a time, they toyed with the idea of hiding their self-contained world above the South Pole, hoping that the harsh conditions and sheer remoteness of such conditions would keep even the most determined hunters at bay. However, when the news of the polar expeditions planned by Norway and Britain reached them, paranoia ultimately drove Columbia away; as vast and inhospitable as Antarctica was, the risk of discovery was still too great – at least in Comstock's mind – to risk the deprivations of the polar wastelands.

Just as it appeared that Columbia had nowhere left to retreat to, Fink MFG hit upon a unique solution. By this time, Undertow had been tested at length, its full potential and side-effects recorded in great detail by an increasingly desperate team of researchers frantic for anything that might offer the city an edge against the Sodom Below… and thanks in part to their CEO's obsession with Rapture, inspiration struck. Days later, Jeremiah Fink himself brought an unprecedented proposal to Comstock: in this sensational business pitch (entirely credited to Fink himself, of course), he suggested that Columbia's salvation lay not above the clouds, but _beneath the waves._

The plan was met with resounding approval, and in the weeks following this conference, Columbia left its haven just off the coast of Chile and made a beeline for the Western Pacific ocean. Across the city, meanwhile, Fink MFG set to work on the men and the machines that would build the city's new home: far above it factories, in areas only seen by best and the brightest of the company's workforce, specialized workshops began building and assembling a series of specially-designed Lutece field-generators, used not merely to levitate but _repel._ At the same time, recruiters began hauling in candidates from the poorest districts of Columbia, chiefly Finkton and other "outcast regions." Close to five hundred able-bodied individuals were gathered, some of them through specially-drawn contracts and false promises of remuneration, most of them through outright press-ganging, all of them destined to become the latest and greatest of Columbia's Vigor specialists.

Over the course of the next few weeks, these unfortunates were infused with vast quantities Undertow, their bodies immersed, injected and suffused with gallon after gallon of the Vigor until many were left teetering on the brink of an overdose. Even the imbued firefighters of most timelines hadn't seen such exposure over the course of their time in the field. Needless to say, test subjects such as these were beginning to exhibit the telltale deformities of concentrated Undertow abuse within a matter of days of their first doses, enough to make even the Downpours seem bland by comparison: by the end of the transformation, the newly-created Vigor-Junkies had lost all but the vaguest connection to human ancestry, often exhibiting huge sharklike jaws with jagged teeth, dozens of muscular tentacles protruding from their shoulders, a nauseating collage of scales, sharkskin and invertebrate flesh in place of skin, bioluminescent organs, a physiology adapted to crushing ocean depths, and a capacity for cetacean echolocation; some even demonstrated crab-like pincers and carapace. Furthermore, all of them demonstrated an impressive capacity for manipulating water, eclipsing the adepts of more common dimensions.

However, the mental side-effects remained the same; this time, Fink MFG had been able to study and learn the full range of Undertow's effects, and an unorthodox solution had been developed. From a combination of techniques learned in the torturous surgeries of Comstock House and technologies pillaged from across the multiverse, the secret workshops of Finkton were able to produce a mechanized helmet that directly affected specific parts of the human brain: from the moment the helmet was forced over the head of the wearer, pressure-sensitive pads on the inside of the helm projected a series of diamond-tipped needles through the skull and directly into the candidate's brains – specific areas of the cerebellum and hypothalamus that existed _only_ in the Undertow-warped Downpours.

Through careful electrical stimulation, combined with neural webbing, suppression circuitry and chemical formulae stolen from other realities, these helmets effectively disabled the Undertow-Junkies' obsessive desire to abandon dry land – while also rendering them highly receptive to certain suggestive impulses. With the technology to produce such impulses at the press of a button and a few authoritative words, Fink now had an entire army ready for the next stage of the plan.

In the final hours before Columbia arrived at its destination, the newly-trained Vigor specialists were unveiled before the public eye as the saviours of the city. Noticing the peculiar design of the helmets they wore, some of the crowd dubbed them _Murmillos,_ after the helmeted gladiators of Rome's infamous Circus Maximus. Most, seeing the harpoons they were armed with, simply called them _Mariners_ – and so the name stuck.

Then, with a thunderous rumble that resounded across the skies, the city stopped in mid-air, high above the Western Pacific Ocean. And before the horrified eyes of the assembled citizenry, Columbia began to descend; shrouded by artificial clouds, Comstock's paradise lowered itself gently from the skies, inching slowly but surely towards the sea.

As they fell, however, the Mariners scattered themselves across the plummeting city, lining up at railings, parapets and outcroppings – most commonly places where, as it happened, Fink's engineers had been busily installing new Lutece Field generators over the past few weeks. At the very last moment before the city landed, the five hundred-strong army of Mariners dived into the water as one; acting on the instructions of Fink's operatives, the Vigor-Junkies then went to work, sculpting the churning ocean into a colossal hemisphere of space large enough to accommodate the entire city. As Columbia descended lower, the modified Lutece Field generators stabilized the hemisphere, holding it in place around the boundaries of the metropolis as it sunk. Above them, the Mariners were still hard at work, slowly carving a vast dome from the rising waters to form a complete sphere around the city, until all of Columbia was safely contained in a gargantuan bubble of water deep below the surface of the ocean.

But it wasn't until the city finally reached the abyssopelagic depths of the Mariana Trench that the city's descent finally ground to a halt; here, Comstock proclaimed, they would be safe from further reprisals. Here, guarded by the Mariners and protected by pressures that would crush any pursuers sent after them, the Founders could prepare God's Vengeance for the Sodom of America and the Serpent of Nations.

For the first time, the people of Columbia looked up and saw, in place of an open horizon of blue skies and mountainous cloudbanks, an endless vista of lightless ocean, lit only by the occasional flicker of pale bioluminescence from the Mariners patrolling the borders of the city. Where once there had been undisputable proof of America's infinite potential and the glory of God channelled through the works of humanity, now there was an unrelenting midnight without the glittering congregation of stars set in the firmament, without the reassuring glow of the moon – only an oppressive, stygian darkness.

Columbia had become the City of Night.

Needless to say, Comstock's paradise had to undergo significant changes in order to feed and manage its population, for stealing from other countries was now quite impossible: the greenhouses of the city were expanded tenfold and outfitted with sun-mimicking lights, Mariners were given permission to hunt for giant squid and sperm whales, Songbird was reinforced for underwater travel, and an entire district was effectively converted into a desalination plant to provide the city with safe drinking water. It was an imperfect process, and a great many workers among Finkton's populace starved over the course of those first few months, but eventually, the city and its people adjusted to life beneath the ocean.

However, something of Columbia's confidence had been lost in the transition: beforehand, the city had been able to partly mask its true nature with a disarming atmosphere of prosperity and wonder, hiding the corruption with ostentatious displays of technology and justifying the atrocities with seeming proof of divine providence. Down in the Mariana Trench, however, maintaining the old optimism was difficult: even with every single light in the city burning at all hours of the day, the streets were always gloomy and disturbing, offering far too many shadows and dark corners in which to vanish; the barrier separating Columbia from the sea seemed fragile, and many lived in crippling fear of the occasional rainstorms that trickled from above, believing them a sign of impending doom. Wealthy Founders grumbled in dismay over the loss of privilege and luxury they had suffered, middle-class families regarded the regular food shortages with dread, and riots became increasingly common in Finkton. Even _I_ couldn't help but be affected by the change in Columbia's skies, for my tower now overlooked a terrifying void dotted with only the feeble lights of a city on the brink of insanity.

Throughout Columbia, the discontent grew so great that Motorized Patriots and Handymen became a common sight on street corners, Songbird was regularly deployed against protesters, and ships capable of traversing the abyss beyond the city limits were made official property of the state. In extreme cases, Comstock ordered the Mariners to lower parts of the dome over offending districts of the city: the process was so swift that most victims didn't even have time to drown before the crushing pressure of the Trench pulverised their bodies beyond all recognition, and so precise that the Mariners could target individual apartments within some of the most densely-populated regions in the entire city; for good measure, the Mariners were allowed to feed upon the semi-liquefied slurry that was left once the waters had receded. Bit by bit, atrocity by atrocity, Columbia degenerated from a corrupt, racist and hierarchical theocracy to an (almost) undiscriminating police state, stripped of all disguise, artifice and all but the meanest traces of charm.

The only thing keeping the populace under control was the fear of discovery, and in order to reinforce that fear, Comstock had the city relocated to the North Atlantic in early 1912, hoping that the move would emphasize how threatened their society truly was. However, this decision was also motivated by a need to satisfy to "prophecies" he'd formulated from what he'd seen through the Tears, and unfortunately, the Prophet's fixation with the predictions of his own future had blinded him to the more prominent examples of world history visible across the possibility space. In April 15th, RMS _Titanic's_ stern collided with Battleship Bay, nearly destroying the entire district and leaving several hundred tons of the White Star Line's _magnum opus_ scattered across the once-pristine artificial beach. Fortunately, few casualties emerged from this disaster, if only because the loss of sunlight had effectively obliterated the Bay's popularity among the Founders.

That year, in accordance with those same prophecies, Booker Dewitt arrived in Columbia. By that point in the unique history of this dimension, the Lighthouse in Maine was the last remaining outpost of Columbia still remaining on the surface, and though its antiquated launching systems were no longer capable of sending travellers to the city, the Luteces were able to modify the one remaining capsule into a halfway decent submersible. In sharp contrast to the more peaceful landings of other realities, Booker arrived violently enough to level the old Welcome Centre, and the only reason why he wasn't caught immediately was because most of the city's attention was still focussed on either the reconstruction of Battleship Bay or the increasingly desperate spectacle of the Raffle and Fair.

As with all his voyages across Columbia, Booker began his exploration of the city at that very Raffle, and it was here that the new character of the Founders' shining city was unveiled: no longer showcasing the hallowed prophecies of Comstock or the technological wonders of Fink MFG, the Fair had long since lost its seal of approval from the Prophet and had since degenerated into a frenzied bacchanal in which the terror-crushed citizens could indulge themselves; booze, drugs, gambling, prostitution, blood sports, and public acts of sexual debauchery were all common fare at the Raffle. Officially, Comstock denied that such celebrations ever took place; unofficially, he allowed Jeremiah Fink to go on hosting them as a further means of establishing control over the populace – on the condition that tribute be paid to his belief system. In this word, Raffle winners were awarded not with the First Throw, but a choice of what punishment be levied upon the designated "race traitors." Needless to say, death by abyssal pressure was immensely popular, and Mariners were stationed at the Raffle at all times in order to delight the crowd with the sight of rupturing bodies.

From the rooftops of the residential districts, with their endless paranoia and constant infestations of Tears, to the shadow-choked crime-ridden streets of Emporia, Booker's journey across Columbia was among the darkest and most frightful of all the iterations of his story featured across the possibility space. Even the few happy moments I enjoyed at Battleship Bay were erased thanks to the district's ruination and the unending night that shrouded it. And next to the near-constant threat of Songbird, easily the biggest danger in the city came from the Mariners: every now and again, the Vigor-Junkies would turn their powers against him, flooding areas of the city – if not simply trying to crush Booker under the weight of the ocean. More often than not, my presence kept the Mariners from unleashing their full power against him, forcing them to attack Booker head-on, usually resulting in a brawl that could only be resolved with handheld artillery, a bolt of Shock Jockey, or a Tear.

Unfortunately for Comstock, it turned out that Fink had made the Mariners a little too powerful for their own good: the Tear activity suffusing and surrounding them was greater than any Vigor Junkie employed in this dimension – and most of the realities adjacent – and as such, their powers tended to react violently to other forms of interdimensional distortion; already somewhat unstable what with the random Tears already loose across Columbia, the effect of my growing powers on the Mariners was nothing short of catastrophic. By the time we reached the lowest regions of Finkton, battles with the Mariners were enough to generate Tears at random, often with violent results: soldiers, Motorized Patriots, Zealots and even Handymen from other Columbias tumbled into the City of Night and immediately descended into brawls with the Mariners, with Booker and I, with the authorities, and just about anyone in range.

In the end, it was my tinkering with established history that triggered the final Breach. While I was attempting to use the Tears to retroactively return Chen Lin's impounded guns to his workshop, a Mariner happened to stumble upon us, probably drawn by the chaos upstairs in the Bullhouse. And at the very moment I opened the Tear, the Mariner attacked Booker: the rift I was accessing and the Tear activity in the Vigor-specialist's body interacted – and _exploded._ The explosion rippled outwards, slicing into random Tears from one end of Columbia to the next and widening the rip by magnitudes, until what had once been a Tear just large enough to encompass the Bullhouse became an interdimensional abyss large enough to encompass the entire city.

Thus, in the timeline we created, the fabric of reality was so weak that Comstock's utopia found itself sharing space with a city from another world entirely, a city uniquely suited to Columbia's new home at the bottom of the ocean.

For the first time in the possibility space, Columbia met Rapture.

And worse still, the Rapture the Founders encountered was not Andrew Ryan's undersea paradise, nor was it the anarchic charnel house it had degenerated into in the wake of the New Year's Eve riots. It was the Rapture of Sofia Lamb, its residents hardened by over a decade of brutal infighting, empowered by year after year of frenzied splicing, and now united under the banner of the Rapture Family.

In most timelines across the multiverse, the Vox Revolution had merely been disastrous. In _this_ reality, bolstered by a horde of fanatical Splicers and god only knew what else the Tears could cough up, the revolution was nothing short of _apocalyptic._

By the end of our time at Comstock House, the Rapture Family had already won – if only because Lamb's dominion had one significant advantage over the Founders: Rapture had been meant to be submerged beneath the ocean, whereas Columbia hadn't. Nitro Splicers had destroyed the city's Lutece Field generators one by one, a small army of Big Sisters had hunted down the Mariners, and the weight of the ocean was all that was needed to obliterate Comstock's heaven-on-earth once and for all.

But after years underground, Monument Island's siphon had been reinforced against such eventualities, and once again, my old protector had to sacrifice his life to make sure my chains shattered once and for all.

* * *

Next to Shock Jockey and Devil's Kiss, Undertow's world of origin was one of the most dangerous realities accessed by the Lutece Twins.

In fact, the moment they opened that first Tear, Rosalind and Robert very nearly drowned when a veritable tsunami of water poured through the Lutece portal and inundated their laboratory. The only thing that saved their lives was a fuse blowing in their machinery, shutting down the portal and giving Rosalind enough time to drain the water away. It took almost three days for them to repair the damage to their labs, replace the ruined equipment and shield their portal against further deluges, but eventually they were able to begin remote exploration of Undertow's world of origin – which they called _**Pontus,**_ after the pre-Olympian god of the sea.

As expected, this new reality was one dominated by oceans: as far as the eye could see, placid saltwater oceans stretched from horizon to horizon, broken only by heavily-eroded pinnacles of stone and the occasional tiny island chain, most of which were too barren to support any kind of permanent life; no vegetation could be found above the water line except for the strands of kelp that regularly washed ashore, no animals lived on or even visited the island apart from egg-laying turtles, and if there had been any kind of civilization present on Pontus, no sign of it could be found.

However, manoeuvring the portal beneath the waves revealed a rich, bountiful ecosystem: multi-coloured coral reefs played host to a dazzling array of aquatic life, from predatory stingrays feasting upon sailfish and barracuda, to giant phasmid lobsters disguised as portions of the reef itself; eels like tree roots coiled across the sea-bed in mile-long lengths, surviving on micro-organisms inhaled through aperture-like mouths in their ponderous trunks; living clouds of ink coalesced into squid to hunt for substantial prey; swarms of ravenous starfish cruised the fringes of the reefs like piranha, dissolving any targets too slow to avoid being latched onto; ambulatory cone-shells shot down passing fish with poisoned stingers and devoured their bodies whole.

As the portal descended ever deeper, the wildlife grew ever stranger – and often more disturbing: in the open oceans of this world, crustacean apex predators, half-crab half-crocodile, hunted down dolphins and saltwater hippopotami; Handyman-sized octopi grazed placidly upon seaweed; schools of murderous jellyfish launched coordinated strikes on passing _mola_ , stinging them into paralysis and gradually dissolving their flesh into edible slurry once they'd finally collapsed; occasionally, an island would turn out to be a giant stonefish, luring unsuspecting turtles to their death. And as the end of a continental shelf neared, shapeless blobs of semi-sentient protoplasm writhed upon the barren seabed, gorging themselves on lost sharks and impregnating whales with their parasitic larvae.

But it was in the darkest trenches of Pontus where the true nightmares were uncovered. Here, in an abyssal night barely penetrable by the Lutece's floodlight, the ancestors of the Downpours and the Mariners dwelled in terrifyingly intricate cities dug deep into the walls of the cliffs and crevasses of the lower midnight zone. Monstrous fishmen identical to the creatures that Undertow users would eventually become, they ruled those lightless waters: they farmed crops of luminous fungus, they hunted in packs for deep-sea angler fish and gulpers, and even ascended to the higher regions to conduct disturbing religious rites atop the barren crags of the surface.

Wherever they went, these fishmen demonstrated the same powers that made Undertow famous, creating unearthly shapes of water and air to baffle their prey and exalt their gods. In hindsight, the Luteces and I now recognize this ability as a powerful eldritch variant of the Vodyanoi watercraeft found in Bas-Lag. Observing their rituals, Rosalind and Robert learned they owned these gifts to an entity called the Mother of the Depths, a chthonic creator-god they had all sprung from and would all return to one day – once they had served to her satisfaction. Until then, the maddened priests of the Mother proclaimed that all must serve her: to hunt, to kill, to steal, and to invade.

"We felled the weaklings of the surface and shattered their kingdoms in ages past," they proclaimed. "We dragged their continents beneath the waves, took the survivors prisoner and brought them to the Mother as sacrifices; she assimilated them as she pleased and in her grace, she blessed a chosen few to be reborn in the womb of the void as our brethren! Now we wait for her to rise from the depths on wings of flesh and shadow; now we wait a new world to appear – a new world for us to conquer at her command! For she is Mother, she who was born from the dying spams of the universe _before_ ours, she who is also named Angelikos, Shodanus, Ko-L'um-biarh, and Tzhuv-N'iq'roth, for she is all gods of war and domination, for she is Conqueror of Worlds!"

As they listened to these deranged speeches and continued to observe the culture of these strange beings, the Luteces happened to notice something rather unusual about the fishmen: they didn't seem to die of old age, nor did they breed like any other species on the planet; there were no children among them, no eggs, no spawning or offspring of any kind. From what little they could see, the fishmen simply swam up from even deeper regions of the ocean, full-grown and ready to serve.

So, with great trepidation, the Luteces directed their roving eye deeper into the ocean, leaving the Abyssal zone behind and finally trespassing upon the Hadal zone. And here, the shell of the world had cracked open – but instead of unveiling a thermal vent or anything of the sort, the crevasse revealed _flesh._

Flesh and _eyes._

The heart of Pontus was a living sphere of writhing, protean flesh. It was this wellspring of life from which the fishmen were born, and was from this eldritch horror that Undertow had been borrowed.

And the last thing the Luteces saw – before they hastily shut down the portal – was the sight of the eyes of that ancient Leviathan turning in their direction.

Just as they saw it, _it saw them._

And though it had no real face, much less an expression, Robert still believes that the monster _smirked._

* * *

A/N: _Up next - Return To Sender!_


	9. Return To Sender

A/N: Aaaaaand I'm back! Don't call it a hiatus, I just lost my mind for a couple of months. In the meantime, a hearty thank-you to all of you who viewed, reviewed, favourited and followed! Also, I don't think I've ever received so many reminders for the next chapter...

 **Xzeihoranth:** Yeah, I decided to avoid making any _major_ references to other franchises outside of those weird little cavalcades of shout-outs; plus, I've also been featuring Nyarlathotep in _All The World's A Toybox_ , so I felt it was time to let a Lovecraftian OC take the stage.

 **BlazeStryker:** I'd almost completely forgotten about that one, too.

 **Frosty Wolf:** Your review was absolutely wonderful! I'm glad you liked the story, and I'm definitely thinking of making a story chronicling Elizabeth's visit to Rapture.

 **Leikiz:** I had a lot of fun writing the bastardized Rapture, and I'm very happy to hear you enjoyed reading it. This chapter's going to be more of a chronicle of Fink's last big embarrassment than an exploration of alternates, but there you go; hopefully it'll live up to the standards set so far, but you'll have to be the judge.

Anyway, without further ado, the latest chapter! Read, review, and above all, enjoy!

Disclaimer: Bioshock Infinite is not mine. Also, there's another massive paragraph of references a little ways through this chapter; none of the franchises referenced belong to me, but see how many of them you can recognize.

* * *

By nature, most Vigors made a very poor transition from military ownership to the civilian market: along with the many moral, spiritual or practical objections posed by Jeremiah Fink's more vocal critics, many of these wonder-tonics were simply too violent to be applied for mundane uses without a great deal of time and effort on the part of the users – or in extreme cases, modification of Columbia itself. As has been mentioned before, the overwhelming majority of the product line had been intended as crass emulations of Rapture's Plasmids, but without any of the unique social conditions that had made the Plasmids so incomparably successful: because the police department, fire service and the army was still in force around Columbia throughout the Vigors' time on the open market, home defence was not a priority among the Founders with the notable exception of a few desperate, paranoid recluses.

However, everything changed when the tide turned in favour of the Vox Populi – either as a result of events unique to the timeline or as a result of my tinkering with dimensional physics. One way or the other, the revolutionaries began recruiting in bulk, and it wasn't long before Daisy Fitzroy's army had finally recouped its losses from the last major arrest – enough to take the fight to the Founders once again, but with a ferocity unseen until now: bombings, diversionary raids and assassinations increased tenfold over the next few weeks, all building towards the day when the Vox finally rose up in revolution against the Founders. In those dark days, with the police and the army stretched too thin to respond to all the incidents across the city, it wasn't long before the increasingly frightened citizens began to re-evaluate their approach towards home defence – not that it did them much good in the long run. Devil's Kiss, Bucking Bronco and Shock Jockey were all greedily coveted by these desperate survivors, and all too many users ended up launching themselves into early graves in deranged fits of overconfidence.

Only one Vigor offered the defensive capacity to defend against such recklessness, and as such, it was Return To Sender – the very last of the Vigors released on the civilian market and the last true bestseller ever sold by Fink MFG – that truly thrived in this new and uncertain environment.

As with all Vigors, Return To Sender was initially pitched to Columbia's military, it's electromagnetic powers being successfully advertised as a means of making Comstock's troops effectively invulnerable. Unfortunately, the usefulness of the Vigor wasn't completely guaranteed, however, for its most powerful gifts required a certain degree of dexterity and force of will to use effectively: all too many users lost focus, faltered at the last minute, and got shot – or worse still, accidentally ricocheted incoming gunfire into their comrades. Nonetheless, the army was able to rapidly isolate the troops who were able to effectively utilize the Vigor's defensive aspects and assign each of these men to a unit, granting every squad their own portable bulletproof shield.

For months on end, Return To Sender remained the exclusive property of Columbia's armed forces, until – as with Fink's other creations – its mental side-effects became too obvious to ignore. Despite the Vigor's impressive defensive value, it was quickly realized that the addicted troops were too unstable to serve as conventional military, and Comstock had Return To Sender quietly retired from military usage: stocks of Vigors throughout the city were placed in storage, and users throughout the army were placed under strict observation. Naturally, Fink MFG provided free housing and medical attention for all afflicted personnel, guaranteeing a steady stream of research data for the company, a wellspring of profitable manpower, and conveniently obviating the need for any of the Vigor Junkies to re-enter polite society.

With no customers available, Return To Sender languished in storage. Research was limited and practical usage was virtually non-existent. One of the very few developments in the study of the formula involved a primitive attempt to keep the imprisoned Vigor Junkies under control through brain surgery, psychoactive drugs, and even the Possession Vigor. Eventually, one course of drug therapy paid off just enough to make the junkies _partially_ cooperative: for a time, Fink employed some of the more stable "Nickel-Platers" as bodyguards in public appearances, trusting that their powers would defend him from even the most determined anarchist; a few even made it as far as his Centurion program. However, the accelerating physical side-effects of Return To Sender eventually rendered this means of control useless, and the program was quietly shut down.

Then, seemingly out of the blue, Fink decided to have the Vigor transferred to the civilian market.

At this point, even the company itself protested. For the first time in the history of Columbia, the directors of the sales and marketing divisions issued a formal warning to the robber baron; when that didn't work, they compiled a thirty-page report on the unprofitability of the product as a civilian release; when that didn't work, they resorted to an interview with Fink in a desperate attempt to get him to understand a very simple and obvious fact: because the product was so combat-oriented and no mundane applications emerged until comparatively late in subject development, they had no real way to advertise Return To Sender to the public without an extensive atmosphere of panic throughout Columbia, and at the time, the Vox Populi were officially on the run – or so it was believed.

The signs were visible to anyone with eyes to see: Fink MFG was about to release another Devil's Kiss – another Vigor that could only hurt their profit margins and do untold damage to the company's reputation. With several hundred gallons of Return To Sender in storage awaiting sale, economic advisors recommended that these stocks be repurposed for experimental purposes or destroyed entirely, and barring Fink's intervention, the Vigor might very well have been used for little more than feeding the junkies already in company custody.

Unfortunately, Fink's numerous disorders were finally beginning to overwhelm him: his cocaine addiction had reached nightmare proportions, and a burgeoning case of alcoholism – his means of self-medicating his increasingly disastrous headaches – only made him even more unstable. Where once his avarice might have at least granted him the rationality to abandon his plans once they were longer feasible, now his deteriorating state of mind had left him too fixated on attaining the legendary successes of Fontaine Futuristics to draw back from the precipice. He didn't just want money: he wanted a power over his customers that could drive them to war if he so desired it; he wanted the kind of influence that only the religion of the Founders possessed; he wanted the economic authority that could allow his company to stand as a superpower in its own right – for he had seen how a simple fishery had transformed Rapture into a battleground, and lusted for the chance to make that power his own.

Return To Sender was the last of the original formulas, his final chance to make the Vigors every bit as influential as the Plasmids of Rapture and _more_ ; once that was over, he'd either have to find some means of producing his own formulas or go back to hunting the possibility space for other means of replicating Frank Fontaine's wonder-product – an unlikely prospect, given his earlier failure to retrieve anything of value. As his chance to claim this Holy Grail of profitability slipped further from his grasp, the angrier he became: shouted arguments became distressingly common around the offices of Fink MFG, bilious tirades following even the slightest provocation – real or imagined. Simple queries from underlings often sparked paperweight-throwing temper-tantrums, and the arrival of the report was enough to send him on a rampage through the executive labs, overturning desks, kicking over blackboards, and even setting fire to several months' worth of priceless research. The executives who'd made the mistake of meeting him in person were actively threatened with exile to the lowest depths of Finkton, and considered themselves fortunate to have left the building via their private transports – rather than via the boardroom window, as Fink had originally intended.

In the end, the hierarchies at play within Columbia ensured that Fink's word was law, and as long as Fink was still lucid enough to maintain his stranglehold, all attempts to alert Comstock to the unrest within the company ended in failure. As a result, Return To Sender was marketed to the public with considerable fanfare from the company: this time, no comical imagery was to be associated with the product, least of all the alluring devils or lightning-bolt jockeys that had decorated the bottles of earlier Vigors; Return To Sender was to be ushered in with displays of heroic imagery – its label and bottle adorned with the plumed Corinthian helmet of a Greek hoplite. In turn, a vast array of gaudy advertisements were unleashed upon unsuspecting audiences, featuring lividly purple testimonies of how well the Vigor had fared in combat, illustrations of magnificently-armoured men repelling bullets with a wave of their hands, and even kinetoscopes featuring films of Return To Sender in action; no comedy, no appeals to mundanity, no performers on street corners, nothing other than the heroic image of the hoplite. Even the instructional animation only maintained its cartoonish style out of a need for verisimilitude.

And when Return To Sender was finally released, the nervous executives soon realized that what they were witnessing was not another Devil's Kiss in action. If anything, it was even worse: within the first two weeks of its public release, stores throughout Columbia failed to sell a single dose of Return To Sender.

For once, the public just wasn't interested. The citizenry had no need or desire for home defence, not while the police and the army were still ably defending Columbia – or so it appeared. Indeed, in some outlying realities where news of the turmoil was successfully suppressed by Comstock and panic purchasing never became a trend, Return To Sender remained a total failure on the civilian market, selling at a loss and ultimately forcing the company to remove it from the market.

Needless to say, Jeremiah Fink did not take the news of this failure very well.

Summoning the company's board of directors to an emergency conference, he railed at them for almost five hours, blaming every single executive in the room for Return To Sender's failure and demanding the immediate resignations of any who'd directly or indirectly opposed the Vigor's sale. It was perhaps the most explosive diatribe Fink had subjected his employees to, rivalled only by the "dismissal" of Scofield Sansmark: the only difference lay in the fact that unlike the unfortunate head of security, Fink couldn't have the directors – upstanding members of Founder society to a man – executed as a warning to other employees… not that he didn't try.

More than once during that delirious meeting, he raved about having the marketing and sales directors accused of treason, jailed for life, even having them executed as Vox Populi saboteurs – and the only reason why he didn't order them arrested on the spot was because he lost his train of thought in mid-rant. When he wasn't making wild accusations, he was flitting madly between the fantastical and the paranoid: convinced that the assembled directors were trying to overthrow him, he did everything he could to convince them that Fink MFG still needed his leadership, bombarding them with his deranged fantasies of astronomical profits and impossible commodities. Envisioning a new product line that could do everything from mowing lawns to guaranteeing eternal youth for its users, Fink ranted at length about he could outdo the Luteces, how he would steal the powers and technology of a million different realities.

Drawing on everything he and his operatives had witnessed through the Tears, he promised his directors access to Rapture's Plasmids, the morphing power of the Escafil device, the life-expanding visions of Melange, the destructive potential of Trance, the near-infinite durability granted by Agartha's Bees, even the eldritch powers offered by the Outsider's Mark and the Marks of Chaos. The Force, John Crichton's wormhole technology, Orichalcum-powered machines, Go-Away Bombs, mind-control ties, Red Sand, telekinetic amulets, armour of adamantium _and_ vibranium, Dragoon spirits, Remaking techniques straight from Bas-Lag, batteries powered by miniature universes, Professor Langstrom's positive viruses, Pieces of Eden, the Big Mountain Think-Tank's inventory, Lyrium-forged golems, every incarnation of Excalibur found in the multiverse, Tavlek Gauntlets, Lantern Rings of every colour of the rainbow, Tokra symbiotes, Basil Carlo's clay, Mystery Vortex snowglobes, Groznium cybernetic implants, a million different forms of vampirism… all could be theirs for the taking – _but only if they cooperated with Fink._

Granted, he never once specified how Fink MFG would _use_ these weird and impossible powers, much less reverse-engineer them, but the deluge of information didn't brook much opposition from the bewildered company directors. For the moment, the board chose to cooperate: most of them were stalling for time, hoping that Comstock would one day lose patience with Fink's increasingly counterproductive attitude and have him committed to an asylum – allowing one of them to take the reins.

And then the terrorist attacks started again.

Suddenly, with the police force stretched too thin to defend the people and the army too busy defending vital industry to bother with the citizens, attitudes towards home defence shifted very rapidly. In a matter of days following the first bombing, the people of Columbia wanted something that they could easily use to defend themselves and their homes, and with most of the Vigors being too destructive, too difficult to use or just too disgusting for their tastes, Return To Sender emerged as the most useful of the entire product line. With a single sip, customers could deflect bullets, send them flying back at their opponents, and with time and training, could even turn other metal objects into airborne weaponry. By the end of that first terrible week, every last bottle of Return To Sender had sold out, and Fink MFG was doing serious damage to its previously useless stockpile in order to feed the public's growing appetite. Soon, the manufactory was churning out fresh doses of the Vigor at triple the usual rate, the once-idle equipment unceasingly at work on producing the newly-crowned company bestseller.

Inevitably, the long-term side-effects of Return To Sender became known to the public, for it was being consumed in such quantities that the symptoms advanced at a much swifter rate than before; and even with the bulk of the Founder citizenry too scared to leave their homes except to buy more Vigor, there was still enough opportunities for news of afflictions to begin circulating. Already, the initial results were well-known, with first-time drinkers manifesting silvery-black metallic skin on their hands and fingers, their flesh instantly converted to a substance stronger than steel; as Tear activity increased throughout the body of the user, the transmutation spread to encompass the rest of the body until the newly-minted Vigor Junkie had been completely transformed into semi-organic metal. For good measure, the features of the afflicted changed ever-so-slightly as the metallic growth expanded, often giving them an oddly _skeletal_ aspect: fingers seemed more slender, reminiscent of bare metacarpals; torsos appeared sunken and emaciated; faces grew narrow and gaunt, the eyesockets deep and overshadowing, hair growing sparse and brittle – until it often flaked away as little more than glittering metal fibres.

In turn, the mental side-effects were no less intriguing: users became increasingly stoic as their dosages increased, their metal growths appearing to atrophy sections of the brain concerned with fear and self-preservation. "Nickel-Platers" such as these would often march headlong into burning buildings, wade through artillery fire, and even risk hand-to-hand combat with Handymen if it meant protecting their possessions.

Many such sufferers retreated to the privacy of their own homes once the symptoms manifested, but a quite few were seen outdoors, often in the wake of the few terror attacks to hit residential areas prior to the uprising, for because of their blunted sense of self-preservation, they had no fear of being harmed – or being seen by the public. Against all expectations, responses were overwhelmingly positive: metal skin only granted the user greater protection, as far as the terrified public was concerned, and the fearlessness Return To Sender could only be a boon to one's friends and neighbours. More to the point, many of them had progressed from catching bullets to electromagnetically wrenching guns from their opponents' hands, or even shutting down automated stallions by sheer force of will; several no longer needed to eat, drink, sleep or even breathe, their transmutations having rendered them beyond such pedestrian physical needs. How could such powers be anything _other_ than a benefit?

Jeremiah Fink was happier than he had been in months: confident that Fink MFG was well on its way to eclipsing Fontaine Futuristics in profitability, he celebrated in notoriously decadent fashion, throwing all caution for his image or his personal security to the winds as he sought out ever-more grandiose means of rewarding himself for his apparent success. As a result, the Good Time Club soon became host to a monstrously hedonistic party that lasted for the better part of three weeks: the entertainment escalated from burlesque dancers to prostitutes, from alcohol to cocaine and heroin, from boxing to gladiatorial duels to the death. This bacchanal refused to abate, day or night: whenever something needed to be done in the company, it was delegated to the directors' underlings; if there were issues concerning local security, it was handed over to the police, regardless of how overworked and understaffed the men and women at the Bull House were. Any executives who might have had concerns were deliberately tranquilized to avoid anyone spoiling the fun. Nobody cared what the company workers might think of the festivities, and nobody cared that the fuse of a powder keg might already have been lit; even as the terrorist attacks escalated outside Finkton, even as tensions within the slums escalated, Fink and his executives went on partying. After all, their profits were assured: if the onset of side-effects hadn't scared off the customers, nothing could.

In the final days of Fink MFG, their customers now included families, small business owners, private security guards, and just about anyone within reach of the more prominent "incident zones" – to wit, most Columbia. However, the most profitable clients took the form of wealthy paranoiacs, who bought in bulk directly from the company: convinced that they would be swamped by a tide of Columbia's downtrodden and oppressed, they armed their household staff more often than not, ordering bodyguards, butlers, chauffers, cooks, and even the maids to partake of the Vigor. Oddly enough, many failed to imagine that these servants – several of whom were black or Irish – might have some sympathy with the Vox Populi: as far as these rich families were concerned, the servants owed their lives to the Founders, and would never dare side with their "lesser cousins in Finkton," not even with the fear-eradicating effects of the Vigor affecting their thought-processes; how would they survive without the generosity of the Founders? The few that recognized the danger merely upped the doses of Vigor to the staff, hoping that their addiction might make them easier to control.

It didn't.

What nobody realized – until it was too late – was that the mental side-effects of Return To Sender was not limited to reducing fear: Nickel-Platers became increasingly cold and unsympathetic towards others, seemingly losing their ability to feel anything other than the most rudimentary emotions, and discarding all but their closest relationships. Business associates, employers, friends were all left by the wayside, and only the most-cherished lovers, spouses and children were retained. However, the afflicted no longer regarded these loved ones in the same way as before, and indeed rarely interacted with them at all: they only took measures to feed and protect them – regardless of the cost. In the case of more antisocial Nickel-Platers, many of them simply protected their belongings, their homes, their fortunes, their heirlooms, but as with their more social counterparts, they had lost their ability to appreciate the things they loved in the same way: they merely guarded them, albeit with all the ferocity of a dragon brooding over its hoard. Unlike the manipulative psychopaths born of Possession and the apathetic monsters created by Bucking Bronco, the Nickel-Platers could still remember their old lives, could even "care" about them after a fashion – but had lost their ability to interact with the world in a way more tragic than any Preacher or Hellion.

Thus, when the Vox Populi revolution finally blossomed across Columbia, the servant Vigor Junkies simply walked off the job and vanished into the streets.

Needless to say, the Nickel-Platers did not join the exodus of Founders leaving Emporia and the other Vox-targeted districts, nor did they join the Vox uprising. Worse still, their families were not permitted to take flight: though the spouses and children of such addicts were never physically abused, they were nonetheless prevented from leaving their homes, and any attempts to escape were curtailed by the Nickel-Platers' increasingly versatile magnetic powers. Often, runaways found themselves bound and gagged with strips of scrap-metal to prevent them from running away, and some Vigor Junkies were so determined to keep their families caged that they went so far as to weld the doors and windows shut. In improvised fortresses such as these, the Nickel-Platers remained stubbornly grounded throughout the revolution, leaving only to acquire food for their captives. Nothing would convince them to release their hostages from captivity, especially towards the very end of Columbia's existence, by which time most of these Vigor Junkies were too far-gone to even _speak_ to their terrified charges, much less regard them as living beings.

Given the fact that the Nickel-Platers were so reclusive, Booker and I rarely encountered them: most of them remained cloistered in their homes throughout our journey across Emporia, lurking in cellars and garrisoned in attics. Because we rarely had cause to investigate residences such as these, most of the time we only saw these solitary addicts was on their occasional supply runs; despite their comparative unobtrusiveness, Nickel-Platers were easy to spot – if only because their alien appearances made them a natural target for panicky snipers. With this in mind, it wasn't too hard to follow them across the district, for by then these Vigor Junkies were so powerful that gunfights were effectively pointless: all too often, they left a trail of bullet-ridden corpses in their wake. After the first couple of hopelessly one-sided battles observed in the distance, Booker and I decided to abide by the tenet that discretion was the better part of valour and avoid disturbing the Nickel-Platers unless we absolutely had to.

Across the possibility space, run-ins with addicts such as these occurred only in timeless in which Songbird arrived on the scene earlier than usual, forcing us into shelter in the same basements where the Nickel-Platers were barricaded – along with their families, loved ones or personal possessions. Immediately, the situation quickly spiralled into a bewildering confrontation, with the Vigor Junkies demanding we leave, the families of said Vigor Junkies pleading for us to rescue them, Booker trying and failing to negotiate, and me attempting to make sense of the bewildering Tear activity going on inside the Junkies. Confrontations like these rarely ended peacefully: already the Nickel-Platers had a significant advantage in combat, but with their defenceless families crowded into the cellars alongside them, I couldn't afford to use my powers for fear of collateral damage, so in the end we were forced to retreat.

Our victories in these battles were few – and were entirely due to the fact that Songbird happened to find us. In the end, the vaunted invincibility that Return To Sender conveyed was of little use against my old protector, who rarely gave the Nickel-Platers any time to react before flattening them beneath his talons.

* * *

Vigor specialists based on Return To Sender were rare in Columbia, though not for the reasons one might think.

Like the Preachers, the Mariners and other rarefied specialists occurring across the possibility space, the Centurions were only deployed in Columbia in a handful of timelines, usually ones where the struggle between the Founders and the Vox became so extreme that pitched battles were the only possible outcomes. In worlds like these, Centurions were formidable opponents, near-unstoppable titans of sculpted physique and implacable strength, often so impressive that they often accompanied the Handymen to battle – being the only ground forces that could hope to keep up with the gargantuan cyborgs. For a time, they were so impressive that in their realities they became one of the most enduring symbols of Comstock's regime: a company of Columbia's finest soldier was never complete without a Centurion leading the army, and as the iterations of the city grew more extreme, so too did the armies – until all-Centurion armies became almost commonplace, a scenario that only became more terrifying for its rarity across the possibility space.

In the mainstream realities, of course, Vigor-Junkies of this stripe were non-existent in Columbia. _**In the Sodom Below,**_ however, the mainstream Centurions persisted long after the death of Fink MFG.

The Mainstream Centurions were a fanciful creation at best, the product of Jeremiah Fink's last, deranged attempts at currying favour with Father Comstock. In his escalating madness, the robber-baron conceived of a plan to devastate the Sodom Below ahead of schedule, not through the power of Columbia and its mighty airfleet, but through lone agents – individuals with powers that more than equalled the might of an army. Unknown to the earthly nations and effectively untraceable, these empowered operatives would theoretically be able to inflict catastrophic damage before finally being destroyed, gradually whittling away their defences until the world was ripe for conquest by the Seed of the Prophet. He even suggested that these Vigor Junkies might be able to go dormant, remaining hidden in the wilderness until signalled by radio, and then raise armies in Comstock's name to preparing the way for the inevitable purification – hence their codename.

However, the Prophet turned Fink down: the visions that the Tears had shown him confirmed that the Sodom Below would fall before a Columbia ruled by the Lamb, and nothing done in his lifetime – or that of Jeremiah Fink – would have any effect on the works of the Devil. For good measure, he also forbade even the most basic combat tests, reminding his petitioner that the military had long since dismissed the utility of Return To Sender, having no means of motivating the soldiers afflicted by it. But for once, Fink wasn't listening: in a fit of cocaine-fuelled pique, the delusional entrepreneur threw caution to the wind and ignored Comstock's directive altogether, believing that he would be able to earn his approval through the casualties his brainchild inflicted upon "the Serpent of Nations."

With several Nickel-Platers already held in the company vaults and regularly dosed with Return To Sender, finding volunteers for the Centurion program did not take long. As for properly empowering them, all Fink had to do was repurpose the pumping systems commonly used to imbue the Firemen with Devil's Kiss, and within a matter of days, twenty-four of the original thirty-five Vigor-Junkies had achieved self-sustaining abilities (the remaining eleven having overdosed and died of tetanus). However, complications arose when it came time for the Centurions to be trained for their mission: at this stage in their development, normal means of persuasion were simply out of the question; their stoic personalities were immune to operant conditioning, the transmutation of their grey matter made corrective brain surgery ineffectual, and the Possession Vigor could only last so long, especially given that the Centurions were meant to be operating unsupervised.

So, Fink resorted to his only remaining option – in this case, taking hostages. Tracking down the friends, families, lovers and even personal possessions of the Vigor Junkies, he placed them in custody well out of the would-be-Centurions' reach, and told his charges that they would be reunited with the objects of their obsession when – and only when – their missions were complete. Stubborn as they were, the addicts at least recognized that retrieving their beloveds was impossible without Fink's permission, and agreed to comply with the robber baron's demands.

Each Centurion was loaded into a rocket-pod of the kind more commonly used to deliver pilgrims into Columbia, but instead refitted in order to deliver Fink's operatives into enemy territory: intending to give his metallic warriors an entrance that could not be traced back to Columbia, he'd had the pods targeted at areas where they would not be immediately found; from there, the Centurions were ordered to proceed to highly-populated areas where they would be able to inflict the greatest terror and panic. Indeed, several of them were specifically instructed to march on capital cities, including Washington DC, London, Tokyo, Moscow, Peking, Berlin, and Paris.

Ultimately, the plan was flawed from the very beginning, and a feasibility study would have shelved the whole thing early in the development phase if Fink had been willing to listen. Easily the biggest problems were technical in nature: because the pods were not fitted with Lutece Field generators or automated intelligences (a measure intended to prevent enemy governments from reverse-engineering Columbia technology) they relied on precisely-calibrated engines; when fuel tanks were exhausted, the vessel was to deploy a parachute and land. However, what nobody seemed to understand was the fact that these so-called ascension pods had been originally designed to do exactly that – ascend – and little else: long-distance horizontal flight was not a feasible option because the pods simply weren't aerodynamic enough to fly with any degree of accuracy, and there was only so much that customization could improve. Worse still, with Fink demanding immediate results, the calculations were often inaccurate at best, and the hasty modification of the engines only made the delivery system even more inefficient.

Combine all this with a squad of operatives comprised entirely of emotionally-disturbed drug addicts with crippling brain disorders, and Fink's triumphal enterprise quickly degenerated into a grotesque comedy of errors.

Of the twenty-four Centurions sent into the Sodom Below, only two of them reached their intended targets, and those emerged from their pods to mixed results at best: one landed so violently that it actually triggered a landslide, entombing both the pod and the small town it had been targeted at. By the time the operative was able to dig his way out, a major bandit gang was already pillaging the ruins for valuables, stripping corpses of jewellery and dynamiting their way into bank vaults. The ensuing fracas cost the lives of almost every single scavenger in the area, but eventually the ringleader was able to lure the operative into a collapsing house and pin his head under half a ton of rubble. Blind, immobile and unable to direct his powers without a visual reference, the unfortunate Centurion was left helpless as the remaining bandits wrapped his body in dynamite and reduced him to inanimate scrap.

The other pod failed to stop at the intended time, apparently due to a mixture of engineering errors and the Centurion's misguided attempts to correct the course via magnetism: as a result, it ploughed through five houses, a general store, a mill, a bank, and a number of protective barriers before finally crash-landing in an open mineshaft. Moments later, the impact triggered a cave-in and brought the entire roof crashing down on top of the pod, trapping the operative inside the mine; with the facility too badly damaged to restore to working order, the place was quietly shut down – effectively sealing her inside for the foreseeable future. It took ten backbreaking years for the Centurion to burrow her way out of the initial rockfall, and another twenty to make any progress on her escape attempt, for digging too hastily resulted in further cave-ins which the operate only _barely_ managed to survive. By her thirtieth year inside, she had recovered from the latest crushing damage and had begun gradually carving a path through the rock: it was a long and arduous process, requiring a delicate touch to avoid destabilizing the roof, along with frequent backtracking – for of course, the Centurion had no idea where she was going. Eventually, almost forty years after her arrival, the operative finally dug her way to sunlight in the year 1951, several hundred miles from her original position: with most of her map references hopelessly out of date, however, she most she could do was roam aimlessly across the desert – until she finally found what _appeared_ to be a town in which she could begin her abortive reign of terror anew. Unfortunately, the "town" was situated right in the middle of the Nevada Test Site. Once the smoke had cleared, technicians wondered a bit about the strangely human-shaped puddle of molten debris found in the ruins of the test village, but otherwise thought very little of it.

The remaining twenty-two Centurions met even more ignominious fates. Nine landed in various oceans and were never seen again, ending up either crushed by abyssopelagic depths or becoming so lost on the sea bed that they could never find their way back to the surface. Three more were lucky up to land in a very specific region of the Atlantic, and after forty-five years of fruitless wandering through the deep, happened upon the city of Rapture and became instant celebrities.

Another oceangoing Centurion eventually managed to make his way onto dry land via the beaches of Australia's North-Western Coast, and for the next ten years, tall tales of an implacable "iron maiden" roaming endlessly across the Great Sandy Desert circulated throughout the country; no attacks were reported, either because the operative had given up on her mission or simply lapsed into disassociative insanity (again, I can view the histories, but I can't read minds – and unlike Fink, the Centurions weren't interested in keeping journals).

Elsewhere, a pod aimed at Washington DC flew too low and crashed headlong into Mount Whitney, scattering the unfortunate Centurion's remains over the Sierra Nevadas.

Two pods targeting the south of England actually collided with each other in mid-air, killing one Centurion and leaving the legless remains of the other to crawl ghoulishly into the legends of rural Somerset – quite a detour considering that they were supposed to be heading for London.

Another Centurion missed Texas entirely and somehow landed in _Brazil_ of all places, and the operative's attempt to carry out his intended rampage only concluded with him wandering into the Amazon rainforest and never being seen again.

Four crashlanded in Siberia and quickly became lost in the wilderness; unable to find their way to their original objective, they resorted to preying upon isolated settlements for several years – right up until the new Soviet government finally retaliated with an artillery barrage that not even Return To Sender could repel.

The last found himself in Antarctica, where he predictably vanished into legend: for decades afterwards, research stations abounded with tales of a strange, silent figure roaming the ice, a man who ignored all hails and seemed to ruin compasses simply by walking past; dozens of attempts were made to contact the wandering man, and all met with dismal failure, but ghost stories of isolated bases and camps being slaughtered to the last man persisted right up until the day that Columbia descended from the sky.

* * *

Return To Sender's world of origin was the last explored by the Luteces prior to their death. According to Robert, they had been doing everything they could to delay extended testing, for the initial Vigor phenomena had caused no end of chaos around the labs when it had first manifested: the Devil's Kiss and Shock Jockey phenomena had been bad enough, but the magnetic fluctuations of Return To Sender had almost ruined their entire lab, including their Lutece portal. In fact, had the Luteces not been able to isolate and neutralize the manifestations before they'd escalated to full-blown electromagnetic pulses, Monument Island might very well have plummeted out of the sky.

In the end, however, curiosity won out over caution: they had almost reached the end of their roster of Vigor phenomena, and were anxious for new dimensional vistas to explore. So, once they were certain that the laboratory had been properly shielded against electromagnetic distortion, they tentatively activated their portal and opened a Tear to Return To Sender's home dimension.

To their surprise, the world that appeared before them was a beautiful, verdant realm of lush rainforests, vast and peaceful oceans undisturbed by storms, colossal stretches of jade-green grass, and mountain ranges that glittered like gemstones from horizon to horizon. By all appearances, the world was a paradise: volcanic activity was non-existent, and seismic activity never registered; no droughts attacked the vegetation, no monsoons flooded the land, no season fires were ever seen, and even the wind never rose above a gentle gale; fruit-bearing trees were common, and from what small samples the Luteces dared to take, safe to eat from – to the point that poisonous plants seemed virtually unknown on this world; the animal life seemed placid and quiescent, mostly restricted to grazing marsupials no bigger than sheep, kitten-sized insectivores, and brightly-coloured flightless birds. Even the soil samples came back teeming with potential for cultivation.

But despite the splendour and serenity, two troubling questions occurred to the Luteces at this point:

Firstly, how had an electromagnetic Vigor with metallic transmutation effects have originated from a world as fertile and abundant as this?

Secondly, how had this place gone undisturbed for so long? From what little they could tell from the patterns in the sky, this was a reality in which stellar travel was relatively commonplace, so why hadn't anyone attempted to colonize it?

As it turned out, someone already had – several someones in fact: having sent their roving interdimensional eye of a voyage through the rainforests, the Luteces discovered the remains of a starship partially crushed between the roots of a tree; on closer examination, the hull of the ship was degrading at an accelerated rate despite only having been there for perhaps a few days at the very most, almost as if the tree was actually _digesting_ the wreckage. Delving deeper into the forests, they discovered other such vessels, all of them abandoned by their owners and all of them being slowly absorbed into the trees. No bodies were found in or around any of the ships, and fresh tracks were still visible in the soil, so it seemed logical to presume that the crews had survived.

Following the trail of footprints, Rosalind and Robert found evidence of past habitation partially buried in the soil of the grasslands: prefabricated structures, supply crates, vehicles, weaponry, even toys had been dragged beneath the ground, though how this could have happened was anyone's guess; all tests confirmed no seismic activity, no subsidence, no instabilities in the soil. It was as if the ground had simply _absorbed_ the dwellings. Once again, no bodies were found in any of the structures, and in one of the buildings still intact enough to inspect, there were no signs of a struggle – there was even a half-eaten meal left on the table. More tracks were found in the soil some distance away: whatever had become of the colony, the colonists themselves had departed en mass, unhurried and apparently untroubled.

Bewildered, the Luteces continued following the trail until the path ended in a cave at the foot of a towering mountain range. However, it quickly became apparent that this was not a natural structure, for less than a few feet into the "cave," the floor gave way to a massive flight of stairs leading sharply downwards, deep into the bowels of the world. Luminescent fungi provided most of the light, but brackets and sconces lined the walls in places, indicating that torches had once lighted the path. Eventually, after almost half an hour, the stairs ended in a vast chamber several thousand feet across: from what little the Luteces had been able to see of it with their own paltry lights, it could have comfortable accommodated most of Comstock House in its cavernous depths.

At the heart of this gargantuan complex lay a mausoleum, a great crypt of polished black stone and burnished gold adorned with heroic statuary and monstrous gargoyles. The doors had been sealed shut, and for once, the Luteces' roaming eye couldn't pierce the barrier, leaving the true contents of the tomb a mystery to this day… but in the end, even that monument itself was insignificant compare to what surrounded it.

Lining the paths to and from the crypt were thousands upon thousands of gleaming metal statues, an army beyond counting in attendance to protect the occupant of the tomb and ensure that none disturbed his rest. At first, the Luteces assumed that this was some kind of symbolic display, some artistic show of devotion to a long-dead potentate by an extinct culture. On closer examination, however, the figures amassed on either side of that interminable roadway were not statues: they were what Columbia would one day call Nickel-Platers and what Fink would call Centurions, millions of metallic Vigor Junkies standing perfectly still in the stygian darkness of the chamber, all sentinels assigned to watch over whatever lay inside the mausoleum.

Curiously enough, the chamber wasn't filled to capacity. Indeed, some of the guards had taken their positions only recently… and by the looks of things, they'd all taken the trouble of burning their clothes and belongings in ceremonial before lining up. However, also among the ashes of the firepits were several skeletons, many of them wearing the charred remains of gas masks and HAZMAT suits; for good measure, many of them were still impaled on the metal javelins that had killed them.

It took some delving, but eventually the Luteces discovered the truth: the entire planet was a gingerbread house, a highly-sophisticated trap built solely to acquire new guards for the tomb and new resources for the planet to exploit.

Whenever a sentient life-form landed on the surface, automated systems integrated into the surrounding environment began transmitting a signal directly into the minds of anyone with the brainpower to receive it; over time, it would gradually compel the visitor to follow the signal away from their ships and dwellings and into one of the many cavern entrances to the tomb. The air inside the complex was saturated with dormant microorganisms, created by whatever mysterious society had built the lonely mausoleum: once living tissue entered their sphere of influence, the nanites went to work converting the trespasser into another Centurion, the alterations to their brains ensuring that the new converts would be compelled to protect the tomb from anyone who hadn't been altered. Once the transformations were complete, the soil and vegetation would assimilate anything that the visitors had brought with them, gradually breaking down weapons, ships, and even buildings down into fuel for the machines that kept the trap running – and ensuring that no evidence of previous visitors remained to deter future colonists.

Unsurprisingly, it was the microorganisms that had formed the basis of Return To Sender, transfused into the bodies of the Vigor Junkies via the Tears within the fluid. Presumably, with no tomb to defend, the Nickel-Platers of Columbia had fallen back on defending what was most important to them – with an intensity that made no logical sense in a populated world.

But what was in the mausoleum? Why was so much security required? Was it merely to keep the contents of the tomb from being plundered, or were the contents more dangerous than a simple corpse? To date, the Luteces have not been able to translate any of the inscriptions on the surrounding walls, so the answer will not be known until someone can actually go there and open the doors.

However, the statuary upon the mausoleum may offer some hints: once again, the figure of the Angel of Columbia, wings flared and arms reaching out to embrace the observer. But was this meant as the image of a god that the tomb-builders once worshipped, or was this the occupant of the tomb?

But then, perhaps past tense may no longer be appropriate – not with all I've seen…

* * *

A/N: Up next... remote possibilities.


	10. Remote Possibilities

A/N: Well, here we are, ladies and gentlemen - the penultimate chapter. The second-to-last instalment. I'm immensely grateful for all of you who viewed, reviewed, favourited and followed, and I hope this chapter lives up to the standard I've set so far.

So without further ado, the latest chapter: read, review, and above all, enjoy!

Disclaimer: the Bioshock series is not mine. Also, I must note that in this chapter, I have made use of some of the early concept art for the game as inspiration - again, none of which belongs to me.

* * *

As with most things in the possibility space, the phenomenon of Constants and Variables applied to the Vigors: some differences could be found in how they were acquired and when, but the overall roster of Vigors remained the same in almost every world they appeared in.

However, as with all things, there were outliers: just like the unusual incarnations of myself that appeared at the Baptism, just like the wildly-differing Columbias documented so far, there were a few Vigors that existed beyond the pattern of Constants.

Much like the Preachers and other unique specialists, these Vigors only appeared in very rare dimensions where the original product line was either expanded or altered in some way – most commonly because Jeremiah Fink's researchers managed the herculean task of isolating additional Vigor phenomena, albeit only after direct threats against their families.

Given that the New Vigors were often much more powerful and far more exotic than their mainstream cousins (not to mention more useful) the worlds in which they appeared were permanently transformed by the arrival of the new product line. In many cases, Columbia was so thoroughly altered that the Luteces had no need to resolve the situation, usually because I'd ended up becoming a casualty of whatever Vigor-fuelled disaster had befallen Comstock's kingdom. In a rare few cases, the city itself vanished from the sky long before Booker ever arrived.

Bearing this in mind, most of these Vigors didn't have long histories or extensive documentation; even their worlds of origin are a mystery, if only because Fink wasn't interested in researching the phenomena behind his new products before releasing them to the public – another reason why so many of these Vigors resulted in disaster. Even now that the Luteces have begun their own attempts to track down and research these worlds of origin, there is still so much about the phenomena they spawned that remains unknown.

Even I don't know everything about the New Vigors and the iterations of Columbia that produced them, for beyond the reach of Constants and Variables, my insight into the memories of the long-erased city grows indistinct unless I focus all my willpower. In the past three years of dedicated research, I've only been able to unearth a grand total of six. Who knows? Perhaps there are more out there, lost in the fog of dimensional memory.

As such, I can't offer up the same depth and breadth of information I have in previous chapters, only a collection of short histories – a few vivid, fleeting tales of these remote possibilities.

* * *

 **Websmith** might very well have been one of Jeremiah Fink's worst ideas, even compared to some of its mainstream counterparts – if only because they'd been advertised and sold in the days before Fink's madness had reached terminal proportions. Putting aside its flaws in combat and the notorious pitfalls in marketing, it remains a perfect example of the one lesson in business studies that Fink evidently never learned: just because you _can_ market a product doesn't necessarily mean you _should._

Another mimicry of Rapture's Insect Swarm, Websmith allowed users to summon spiders to attack their enemies and craft cobweb structures at their direction. Having learned his lesson (for probably the only time in his entire life) from Murder of Crows, Fink bypassed his usual pattern of selling the Vigor to the military, and instead rushed it through to the civilian market.

Unfortunately, marketing it for home defence turned out to be a flawed premise: given that spiders generally can't fly, Websmith lacked its predecessor's range and speed, allowing braver foes to simply crush the oncoming tide of spiders under their feet. And while the paralytic venom of the spiders proved lethal in large doses and the fear inherent in their massed assault proved a powerful psychological deterrent, the fact that they were easily stymied by a precipice less than three feet wide proved insurmountable. And while the spiders' ability to craft detailed astonishingly durable structures of out silk was impressive, its utility did little to attract customers – especially once they noticed the flickering visions of urticating hairs appearing on the users' fingers.

Spiders were not a marketable product as far as Columbia's populace was concerned: Websmith _terrified_ them, especially when it came to public demonstrations. The marketing surrounding the new Vigor didn't help, least of all the container design: an enormous spider engulfing the bottle with its legs, the sight alone was guaranteed to induce shudders of fear, as was the product symbol – a menacing crimson spider sitting at the heart of a web. In the end, Fink was grumpily forced to remove the product from the market due to lack of sales and sell it to the military in order to recoup his losses.

In the end, Websmith finally found its niche as an instrument of torture: Comstock's inquisitors _loved_ it, delighting in the terrified expressions of their victims as the spiders flowed over them in their thousands. Oftentimes, they didn't even need to arrange a bite, instead preferring to simply chock their victims' mouths open and send the spiders pouring inside. And as Vox Populi arrests skyrocketed, Websmith was soon accepted in torture chambers all over Columbia, from the interrogation rooms of the Bull House to the "exclusive suites" hidden under the Good Time Club.

Unfortunately, the popularity of the Vigor encouraged addiction, and addiction brought on Websmith's rather grisly long-term symptoms. Within a week, professional interrogators all over the city began exhibiting distinctive shifts in behaviour: asocial tendencies, an unusual craving for raw meat, extreme territoriality, and even attempts to bring their prisoners home with them. Many manifested patches of rough hair, subtle changes in height and build, curious _wriggling_ shapes under their clothes, barely-perceptible malformations of the jaw, and inexplicable facial sores that looked uncannily like eyes.

Soon, disappearances across Columbia prompted a massive investigation, and though the clues often led to a Vigor-junkie interrogator, the trail invariably went cold before detectives could learn the whole story: with their ability to scale sheer walls and gum up skyline rails, the newly-dubbed "Websmithies" easily escaped the investigators. Even the best efforts of the Zealots of the Lady turned up little – in part because their crows usually ended up getting eaten by the suspects.

Eventually, a police inspector managed to track down a Websmith junkie's nest, and brought back troubling news: according to his testimony the one-room apartment had been all but hidden beneath thick sheets of silken webbing, dotted with the heavily-cocooned bodies of several missing persons reported throughout Columbia. Most had already been eaten, but a few of these unfortunate victims were still alive.

The reason for this didn't become apparent until about two weeks later, when perhaps a hundred of these captives abruptly reappeared on the front doorsteps of their homes and businesses, paralysed bit seemingly unharmed. That evening, every single hospital unlucky enough to be sheltering a victim was struck by a sudden infestation of enormous spiders: having hatched from eggs laid inside the returned victim and eaten the unfortunate paralytics alive from within, they burst forth and began hunting for prey, maturing rapidly in the days that followed.

It wasn't until fleeing witnesses reported a plague of eight-legged children feasting on infants in the maternity ward that the scale of the nightmare truly became apparent, and by then, the spiders were already fit enough to leave the hospitals. Soon after, their parents arrived on the scene to take charge of the situation: within a matter of hours, an army of over five hundred juvenile Websmithies was marching to war.

Initially, the Founders appeared to have the upper hand, having superior numbers and greater technology. But the first-generation Websmithies maintained human intellects, and as their offspring matured, they grew more intelligent: give sufficient training, they could operate the airships, the guns, even the factories… and for every Founder they captured, five more Websmithies were born. Combined with their gift for stealth – an almost unheard-of ability among Vigor-Junkies – they had everything they need to devour Columbia from within. Even Comstock's supposed gift for prophecy proved ineffectual: having accepted the pattern of Constants witnessed through the Tears as his fate, the appearance of a foe he hadn't predicted caught him completely off-guard, and the medical hazards of the Tears made it impossible for him to study the future again.

Less than a year after their war had begun, the Prophet's semi-liquefied body was put on display in Victory Square, and Fink was publically devoured. With nowhere to go except a humiliating retreat to the Sodom Below, the armed forced surrendered, allowing the Websmithies to begin remaking Columbia in their image: a vast airborne _farm_ for human cattle.

And as for what happened to me… well, what use would spiders have for Comstock's messiah? Once they'd figured out a way to catch Songbird in their webs, they crossed to Monument Island and did away with the Lamb of Columba – not by violence or even by torture. Instead, in a final act of desecration committed against the Founders' myths, they tied me to a chair and forced so much Websmith Vigor down my throat that not even my powers could protect me against the ensuing mutations.

They made me one of them.

I sometimes wonder if the Luteces tried to send Booker after me in this timeline, if Robert's optimism drove him to continue the experiment in the hope that my father might be able to rescue me from myself. In outlying dimensions such as these, there are limits to what I've been able to see, so I can only ask or guess, but whatever the case, my counterpart certainly doesn't remember meeting Booker – or _eating_ him for that matter – and I suspect that the Luteces will never tell me the answer.

* * *

The **Peacemaker** Vigor was unusual by Fink MFG standards: unlike almost every other Vigor in the original product line, it had no direct offensive capability, not even the reflective power of Return to Sender or the delayed-action effect of Possession. Essentially, it was the one of the rare few nonlethal weapons in Columbia's arsenal:

It allowed users to pacify multiple opponents with a pulse of telepathic energy that effectively disabled their will to fight, leaving them effectively helpless for several minutes. For good measure, the telepathy bestowed upon users often allowed them to direct and control the afflicted for a time, and even gauge exactly when the pacifying effect would finally wear off. In contrast to its more violent counterparts, Peacemaker couldn't be used to force its targets to inflict harm upon themselves or their allies, essentially serving as a pacifistic cousin of sorts to Possession.

Immediately sold to the military and the police force, it proved an immediate success: violent arrests became a thing of the past, and the Vigor proved so effective at extracting confessions that normal methods and even the Possession Vigor were all but outmoded. Peacemaker soon became the perfect means of dispersing protestors, to the point that the Vox Populi were rendered seemingly powerless in their efforts to rally the poor against the Founders. Even rebellions among the military were easily smothered: in this dimension, Cornelius Slate's mutiny never got as far as the Hall of Heroes.

Before long, it was extended to the civilian market, immediately recognized by its distinctive dove-shaped bottle and "chained pistol" logo. Doctors throughout Columbia were licenced to wield the Vigor as a sedative: some used it merely to calm violent patients, while others used it as a less-addictive substitute for morphine. In some cases, it was even used to help soothe nervous personalities and stress-induced disorders, for the euphoria that followed a Peacemaker high lingered for many hours after initial exposures. Even the rage and pain of the Handymen seemed quelled by Peacemaker.

But it didn't last.

For once however, the catastrophe that occurred wasn't due to Vigor addiction or even the simple matter of its discovery; indeed, Fink had been more inclined to study its effects, Peacemaker might have become a permanent boon to the city.

The problem was a simple matter of excess: frequent targets of Peacemaker gradually developed a tolerance to its effects, requiring a more powerful dose of energy in order to maintain effectiveness; telepathic control became less reliable as well, and over time, the euphoria that followed a pulse of Peacemaker gradually soured into a bitter resentfulness that often gave way to anger.

Suddenly deprived of a perfect means of pacifying the Vox, the Founders panicked: soon after, it became accepted practice for police and soldiers to double-dose their targets with additional pulses of Peacemaker, just to make sure they remained under control. If anything, this only allowed the targets to develop further tolerances, requiring even higher dosages – along with further double-dosing.

The end came one chilly November evening when police were called to the scene of a violent protest rally in Finkton. Believing they were witnessing the start of a Vox Populi uprising, police officers armed with Peacemaker bombarded the crowds with the highest possible doses of pacifying telepathy they could muster, hoping against hope that they could suppress "them dirty Vox" before the rioting began. But after weeks of being exposed to Peacemaker at previous gatherings, the crowd not only resisted the calming impulse, but actually grew _more_ violent. Foolishly, the police tried again – and what ensued what nothing short of cataclysmic.

The minds of the crowd rejected Peacemaker on every level, their minds warping permanently under the influence of the Vigor: anger escalated to unreasoning brutality, and hatred accelerated until not even the vaguest annoyance escaped violent retribution. Worst of all, the telepathy of Peacemaker intercepted this madness… and began transmitting it outwards: officer by officer, district by district, the rejection syndrome spread. Anyone who'd been touched by Peacemaker degenerated into unstoppable rage… and by now, that included the entire adult population of Finkton, several hundred formerly-neurotic citizens, an entire battalion of Columbia's military, most of the Vigor Junkies in Fink's employ, and every Handyman currently in existence.

Even the Vox Populi rebellion of the mainstream timelines couldn't match the fury of those who'd rejected Peacemaker: books were shredded, windows were smashed, corpses were reduced to a carpet of thick red mulch; machinery was destroyed regardless of its intended purpose, buildings were either burnt down or blown up, and every unaffected individual who had earned the disfavour of these madmen was brutally murdered. Worse still, as brutal as they were, the rejectors were still intelligent enough to operate machinery: within hours of the first outbreak, a ragtag fleet of air taxis, tugboats and warships had taken to the air with the sole purpose of spreading the carnage as far as possible.

Not long afterwards, Father Comstock was drowned in his own baptismal font by his former acolytes (a full year before Booker would have arrived in Columbia).

Elsewhere, Fink – who'd made regular use of Peacemaker to enforce his will in situations where Possession proved too clumsy for his purposes – was brutally castrated, flayed and finally dismembered by a vengeful mob of his female secretaries.

And with so much animosity centred on the Founders, it wasn't long before I became a target, and even Songbird couldn't stop the improvised flotilla that attacked Monument Island – not once the Handymen ganged up on him. I spent the final terrified minutes of my life struggling to open a Tear and escape, but with the Siphon still suppressing my powers, my efforts were in vain. In the end, I could only stare helplessly as my last fleeting glimpses of a world beyond my Tower flickered before my eyes – until the very moment that the Handymen tore through the Tower's foundations and sent me plummeting to my death.

With the last remnant of the Founders' society dead, the rejectors turned on one another in a frenzy of airship collisions, brutal man-on-machine melees, and full-scale brawls on the deck of Comstock's flagship. By the time the last remaining rejector had died of his injuries, there were less than a hundred people left alive in the entire city, and with their government and religion destroyed almost down to the foundations, they had very little reason to remain in Columbia; most simply fled the city to live out the rest of their lives as recluses in the Sodom Below, their spirits broken.

Those who remained behind had no ability to work the city's machines, much less repair the damage done by the rioting. Within a year, the Lutece field generators had already begun to fail due to lack of maintenance, and in the months that followed, the city was quite literally falling apart; by 1918, the last remnants of Columbia had plummeted into the North Atlantic.

* * *

 **King Brawn** was an immediate success story in both the military and civilian markets, a triumph in the combined fields of armaments and personal fitness. Another attempt at replicating one of Rapture's wonder-products – in this case the SportsBoost gene tonic – this was one of the rare few that actually worked: essentially, it offered users a temporary upgrade to their strength, stamina and overall musculature.

It was first sold to Columbia's military, who were immediately impressed by its combat applications: on top of being able to erupt into sculptured colossi of muscle at will, users easily shrugged off shotgun blasts to the face without even flinching, and commonly demonstrated strength sufficient to punch through a concrete wall and tear through solid steel with their bare hands. A few even managed to survive one-on-one bouts with Handymen.

Enthused by the response, Fink decided to have King Brawn sold on the civilian market as well, complete with a container in the shape of a buff muscle-man, just to drive home the bodily perfection the Vigor offered: thanks to the beach culture of Battleship Bay and the new craze of bodybuilding, it quickly acquired a vast client base of image-obsessed men desperate to impress their friends and prospective romantic partners. Even the side-effects proved attractive, often surrounding users with phantasmal images of the herculean muscles they would grow if they continued using the Vigor.

Unfortunately, its successes were only temporary: as with most Vigors, King Brawn had been rushed onto the market without any form of testing, but in most cases this didn't prove to be a problem until the long-term side-effects appeared; however, _this_ Vigor possessed a hidden flaw that became obvious within a week of its arrival in civilian stores. Put simply, its cost in salts beggared the reserves of most users as soon as they'd finished their first dose.

Up until then, human reserves of Vigorous Salts had been easy to replenish thanks to the Luteces' work in isolating common sources of Salts and synthesizing its purified variant. However, King Brawn required more Salts than any other Vigor before it, and nothing could replenish a user's Salts at acceptable rates short of lugging an entire tank of it around.

And then, a corporal who'd taken an experimental dose of King Brawn the previous week complained of stomach pains and inexplicable hunger during a raid on a suspected Vox Populi safehouse; minutes later, the soldier was found kneeling over the corpse of a freshly-killed guerrilla, soaked up to his elbows in blood, his mouth full of half-chewed meat. It took almost the entire platoon to subdue the newly-discovered cannibal, plus a head-on collision with a troop carrier aircraft to keep him unconscious. When questioned, the unfortunate corporal reported that he'd only regained his ability to used King Brawn at the moment he'd tasted human flesh.

Devout, upstanding Founders though they were, the army's commanders realized that the new Vigor was a tactical advantage they couldn't easily do without, especially given that King Brawn had been released during a time of increased Vox Populi activity – a time of great unrest suspected to be the runup to a full-scale revolution. So, despite their misgivings, they not only allowed the corporal to go free, but went so far as to spread what they'd learned to other King Brawn users. For good measure, they also had the cannibals stationed to the most violent zones in the escalating conflict, ensuring that their powers would be regularly fuelled with the bodies of the dead.

Needless to say, Comstock was never made aware of the cannibals, nor was Fink – who was more than happy to allow civilian users to waste their salaries on entire six-packs of Salt if it meant keeping their perfect muscles. In fact, the civilian "Muscle-Men" might never have realized the truth if it hadn't been for a few talkative army privates with a few too many drinks on hand. To most, the notion of cannibalism just to fuel their powers would have been unthinkable, but the confidence King Brawn instilled was almost too intoxicating to resist. Before long, serial-killings began breaking out across Columbia's quieter districts, the perpetrators returning to Battleship Bay the following weekend with muscles bigger than ever.

And then the Vox Populi discovered the truth as well, and everything began spiralling out of control: realizing that their efforts only fuelled their tormentors, the Vox refused to engage, instead stealing several batches of King Brawn and dosing their soldiers with it. And with starvation and crime rife in Finkton, there were plenty of bodies to go around. Unfortunately, as the Vigor's long-term side-effects set in and the confidence of the Muscle-Men expanded, they became increasingly difficult to command – and when the inevitable Vox Populi uprising occurred, the advantage lay with Muscle-Men on all sides of the conflict.

In the aftermath, the once-mighty theocracy and its deadly opponent were left in control of only of handful of Columbia's districts, now known as the Sanctuary Regions: the Founders retained Town Centre, Monument Island, and Comstock House; the Vox controlled Emporia, numerous residential districts, and what little remained of Finkton. Neither side could claim a victory, for the war had not only left the city's greatest manufacturing district in ruins, but it had allowed the Muscle-Men to claim more than a third of Columbia for their own. With Battleship Bay as their base of operations, the Vigor-addled brutes regularly launched assaults on the Founders and Vox, carrying off men, women, and additional supplies of King Brawn. Most of the captives would simply be killed and eaten, but a few would be made to join the Muscle-Man tribes slowly conquering the city from within.

In the abandoned districts that lay between the Sanctuary Regions, Muscle-Men roamed freely, playing amidst the ruins of Columbia's technology and feasting on anyone desperate enough to cross these barren on foot. By now, the long-term side-effects had become apparent: bloodthirsty, vainglorious and barely sentient, they were easily distinguished by their long, talon-shaped fingers, lipless needle-toothed grins, and simian gaits. Emaciated in build and clad in oversized rags, they attacked from the shadows with vicious hit-and-run attacks until they tasted human flesh, whereupon they swelled to gorilla-like proportions and attacked head-on.

Ironically, this reality emerged as one of the few outliers that still abided by a rough pattern of Constants and Variables: Booker was still sent in to rescue me – only this time, he had to contend with attacks by rapacious Muscle-Men on top of the attempts by the Founders and the Vox to break their stalemate.

But that's a story for another day.

* * *

 **Green Thumb** was one of the few Vigors never even remotely considered for military usage, and with good reason: it was a tool that sometimes functioned as a novelty, and little else. Unfortunately, it also turned out to be lasting proof that just about anything Fink marketed ended up becoming unimaginably dangerous.

Put simply, it allowed users to control plants, to enhance or stymie their growth at will. At most, it could be used to manipulate flora into performing almost human-like motions, even to direct vines and stems into specific forms, but that was the limit… or so Fink believed.

The profits Green Thumb ushered in were only fair-to-middling, but because it offered significant utility value to gardeners all over the city. In fact, the biggest client base for this Vigor was none other than the horticulturists at the New Garden of Eden, for despite the not-unjustified suspicion held towards Vigors, the ability to weed lawns by thought alone proved too attractive to resist. For almost five months, Green Thumb's mushroom-shaped bottles were ubiquitous throughout the greenhouses and parks of Columbia, as were the "Sowers" who used them – easily recognized by the occasional green tinge to their hair and the distinctly wooden feel to their handshakes.

And then, as all things did in Columbia sooner or later, everything went wrong.

It began with an unexpected bout of "illness" among the city's Sowers, one that lasted no longer than a single day. From professional groundskeepers to hobbyist horticulturists, all recovered and returned to work with no ill effects. If anything, they seemed happier than usual – quite conspicuously so, for none of them ever seemed to stop smiling; even growers of black market produce down in the depths of Finkton seemed unaccountably happy. They also appeared more sociable as well, prone to long handshakes, bear-hugs, and as many kisses as they could get away with; they even developed a habit of cooking for friends and loved ones – salads and other vegetable dishes being a common feature – recommending that the recipients share the leftovers with as many people as possible. Vast banquets became common for the Founder elite, courtesy of their devoted gardeners. Even Comstock and Fink soon became the recipients of a platter or two of roast vegetables, and though the generosity did sound a few alarms, food tasters detected nothing amiss.

One week after eating this sumptuous repast, Comstock took to the podium in Victory Square for a public sermon, screamed loud enough to be heard on the other side of Emporia, and then all but burst open as a large oak tree suddenly erupted from his body.

More than half of the citizens who attended that fateful sermon never left the square: the seedlings that had been germinating within them took root long before they could start running, with trees, ferns, shrubs, and even grasses sprouting uncontrollably from their paralysed bodies and burrowing deep into the concrete. Beyond the square, buildings shook and crumbled as newborn trees tore free from the bodies of their hosts, their vast roots crushing everything in their path, until all of Emporia lay in ruins, its crumbling homes and despoiled facades now serving as the foundation of a vast district-wide forest. Any survivors attempting to flee the carnage were intercepted at the gondola station by the Sowers, who were more than happy to incorporate the terrified citizens into their gardens on a more direct basis.

From one end of Columbia to the next, anyone who'd been touched by the Sowers, anyone who'd partaken of the food they offered became a fresh growth of plantlife: even smog-choked Finkton soon erupted with greenery, the once-monumental chimneys and smokestacks crumbling as trees conquered the factories from within and sent their branches soaring a thousand feet into the air, until at last the once-infamous golden statue of Fink vanished beneath the canopy.

None could halt the growth of the plants, especially once the Sowers arrived on the scene: soldiers collapsed into rolling green fields of grass; Motorized Patriots were crushed into scrap metal by the roots of trees; even the mighty Handymen suddenly collapsed as seedlings took root in their remaining organs, dismantling them from within. The Firemen enjoyed a few brief successes, but ultimately Columbia's airborne nature worked against them, allowing the Green Thumb addicts to swiftly force their opponents quite literally over the edge and into the Atlantic Ocean.

Within a matter of days, Columbia had become a forest, and the only form of fauna left alive in the entire city were pollinating insects – the only form of life that the Sowers would permit. Just to make sure that no opposition remained in their new Eden, however, they sent a fast cloud of parasitic spores floating through the air in the direction of Monument Island. My incarnation in that world didn't even have time to panic: all she could do was wonder in confusion at the sound of Songbird dropping out of the sky – before the first creeper tore through her skin.

Most disturbingly of all, the unfortunate men, women and children who'd fuelled all this new growth were not actually dead – or even unconscious. Indeed, they remained fully aware of their condition, their nerves and senses extended through every single plant that had been grown from them, a few even managing to sprout rudimentary faces from tree-trunks – the mouths always open in silent screams. The Sowers paid little attention, and merely went on watering and fertilizing the plants, clucking maternally over the growing plants as if they were children, even as _real_ children writhed in agony beneath the newly-formed soil.

Eventually, the Garden of Columbia left the air entirely, the Sowers gradually piloting it deep into the Amazon Rainforest, where it remained until Booker and I finally erased Columbia from the multiverse.

* * *

 **Masquerade** was in many ways an exemplar among Vigors, a cross-section of everything that made the product line extraordinary, dangerous, and utterly stupid. It presented powers thought impossible, it was catapulted onto the market before anyone could research possible side-effects, it was sold to the military to rousing successes, it was made publically available without anyone considering the hazards, and its true potential wasn't realized until it was too late.

During its time on the market, Masquerade eclipsed just about every single other Vigor in Columbia's history in sheer popularity, mainly due to its value in the fields of utility and fashion, but also due to its uniqueness: by nature, products such as these transformed the user both immediately and over time, but Masquerade was probably the only example of a _shapeshifting_ Vigor.

As long as the Vigor was active, users could alter their bodies in whatever way they pleased: they could become perfect doppelgangers of friends and neighbours, they could sculpt their physiques into visions of beautify unknown to Columbia, or they could warp their bodies into living weapons – shaping every limb into an instrument of murder. And there was much more that could be done with Masquerade, but nobody realized this until much later.

Of course, the obvious elephant in the room was completely overlooked. After all, Fink had already failed to take into account the fact that members of the Vox Populi would be able to partake of the "Divine Gift" of the Vigor as readily as any white citizen without divine punishment. The fact that Masquerade could make perceptions of race absolutely meaningless slipped Fink's mind entirely.

Columbia's military made extensive use of Masquerade in the universes where it appeared, but only in combat: despite its many applications in covert activity, commanders refused to allow its use in espionage against the Vox Populi; to do so would have required their men to take on the features of Black or Irish citizens, and that would have been a permanent stain on the honour of any Columbian soldier. Instead, they were content to allow the Vigor-users among their ranks to charge the enemy head-on, defended only by improbably thick hides and handheld shields of bone and muscle.

Eager as always to profit off civilian buyers, Fink made Masquerade available to the general public with great aplomb, advertising it as a cosmetic accessory. Having formulated the product two whole years before syphilis and cocaine left him too ill to function, the robber baron was in his element, and crafted a marketing campaign that easily outshone any of his previous work – in part because _this_ time, Fink actually had a Vigor with non-combat applications and a genuinely appealing angle to offer customers. This time, instead trying to exploit the public's barely-existent need for home defence, he instead targeted something far more widespread in Columbian society and much more lucrative: _vanity._

With its carnival mask logo and bottle modelled on the figure of a _bal masque_ reveller in full costume, everything about Masquerade was designed to evoke beauty, elegance, and mystery; the advertising posters took the motif even further, often featuring lurid before-and-after sketches of dowdy spinsters transforming themselves into beauties to rival Helen of Troy. And though preachers continued to emphasize the traditional virtues of temperance and humility, few could resist the lure of Fink's advertising campaign. In the end, Founder hypocrisy won out over traditional mistrust of the new, and Masquerade quickly became a bestseller.

For perhaps three months, Columbian society couldn't get enough of the new Vigor. Having made themselves into their own personal vision of Adonis or Aphrodite, fashionable young men and women rarely missed a chance to show off their "Masquerade bodies", with visits to Battleship Bay and the fashionable cafes of Emporia becoming almost a daily occurrence for the dandies and damsels of the Columbian upper crust; hundreds of Silver Eagles were squandered on stocks of Masquerade, and thousands more were spent on maintaining supplies of Salts. Nor was it restricted to the younger generations, for vanity knew no limits of age: older customers were more than happy to pay in order to recapture their youthful looks, and male pattern baldness easily filled the company coffers a dozen times over.

Eventually, Masquerade became a means of entertainment as well: a popular parlour game in Columbian high society was "the game of masks," in which two Masquers tried to see which of them could take on the most ludicrous form. And once it became clear that the only limits of Masquerade were that of the user's imagination, Fink began staging the Concerts of Shape, where professional Masquers delighted the crowds with ostentatious displays of transformation, warping from human to animal, from inanimate object to machine: experienced performers could even take on the shapes of Handymen and small airships.

And then the Vox Populi got hold of it, and suddenly the elephant in the room became visible; the backlash was nothing short of astonishing, as was the realization of the disaster looming on the horizon. With no way of detecting the shapeshifters among them, Vox infiltrates roamed freely throughout Columbian society, committing sabotage, bombing runs, and even assassinations. Almost a quarter of Comstock's inner circle were killed that month, and nothing could be done to stop the death toll… up until Fink, intent on exploiting the situation for every last penny he could wring from it, began spreading a rumour claiming that experienced Masquers had the power to recognize others of their kind on sight – a spectacular feat of mendacity that skyrocketed Fink MFG's profits in almost every social strata capable of regularly purchasing Vigors.

For once in the possibility space, Fink had gotten exactly what he'd always wanted: a means of perfectly mimicking the successes of Rapture. Not only had he found a utility product that could sell almost as well as any Plasmid, not only had he orchestrated a marketing campaign that could bypass the societal strictures that kept Vigors from being a success on par with ADAM, but he'd even found a conflict which he could exploit just as readily as Frank Fontaine had exploited the Rapture Civil War.

Unfortunately, the mimicry proved to be a little _too_ close for comfort: just as vanity and fear inspired the people of Rapture to disregard the negative symptoms of splicing, fear of the Vox Populi drove the citizens of Columbia to overlook or deliberately ignore the long-term side effects of Masquerade. As long as the Vox were still perceived as a threat, nobody minded that hands occasionally became hooves, or that skin occasionally turned cold and scaly, or that people sometimes woke up to find that they'd been shapeshifting in their sleep; as long as they were private and concealable, they were of secondary interest compared to the Vox. Nobody minded that long-term Masquers became increasingly reluctant to return to their natural forms; after all, their natural forms were no longer safe. And it certainly didn't seem to matter that Masquers seemed afraid to remain alone for any significant period of time; after all, groups offered safety, and who cared if handshakes and hugs began to feel more like merging than anything else?

Then one day, the symptoms were no longer private.

Without warning, Masquers began losing control in public: respectable gentlemen suddenly shrank down into their oversized clothes and emerged as squeaking hordes of plague rats; elegant ladies of the social stratosphere mooed in horror as their finely-sculpted bodies bulged out of shape, and struggled to escape the limelight on legs that were already forcing them onto all fours; soldiers writhed in agony as they erupted out of their uniforms, suddenly more gorilla than human; parents unwillingly took on the forms of their own children, dwindling back into adolescence before the horrified eyes of their sons and daughters – who were already becoming the bogeymen they'd seen in their nightmares; even the Vox infiltrators that the public had feared so ardently were helpless to resist the symptoms, dissolving into flocks of doves so swiftly that few of them even had time to react.

And the transformations didn't stop there: no sooner had they completed the transition to their new forms, the afflicted began to change again, faster and faster until none of them retained a solid form for longer than five seconds at a time. Unable to stop themselves, the Masquers oozed and rippled down the streets of Columbia in vast mobs, their bodies shifting wildly from old to young, from white to black, from human to animal and back again as they frantically searched the city for anyone who might be able to help them.

But nobody could help them: Masquerade had become so ubiquitous throughout Columbian society that only a handful of citizens remained unaltered, most commonly the Handymen and Vigor-junkies of Columbia's military. Even Finkton hadn't been spared the plague, many of the poorest inhabitants having joined the Vox Populi solely for the chance to enjoy walking unseen among the Founders. Soon, Comstock and few remaining government officials left untouched by the disaster found themselves effectively alone in a city that no longer responded to their commands, with only the brutes of Fink MFG maintaining tenuous control of their defences.

And then, the symptoms reached their final phase: drawn by an instinct they couldn't explain, the Masquers began to congregate in downtown Emporia, shapeless beings from all over Columbia suddenly united; then, they began to melt. No longer able to maintain physical cohesion under the onslaught of constant transformation, their bodies collapsed into gelatinous protoplasm and began to slowly merge into a vast lake of undulating slime, broken only by the occasional appendage manifested by the viscous mass – an arm, a face, a fanged maw. Most disturbingly of all, the Masquers no longer appeared to be suffering: even from a distance, the few remaining survivors could quite clearly tell that the lake appeared to be _moaning in ecstasy._

And as it oozed after them, its protean mass instantly restructuring itself into forms better adapted to pursuit, they heard it whispering with a million different voices:

"Embrace shapelessness."

"Accept our gift."

"Drink of the Vigor, and you can be like us."

"Join us."

Needless to say, a few unaltered humans were no match for the Masquer collective, and after years of pointless suffering, none of the Handymen retained the will to fight on behalf of a dead city; even Songbird didn't stand a chance against an enemy that didn't have bones to crush or flesh to tear. Fortunately, I ended up as collateral damage of the collective's battle with Songbird, and was never assimilated into its mass; nor did the shapeless being learn anything of Tears or the Lutece portal, so the multiverse at least remained outside its ambitions.

However, it had Columbia all to itself, and that was bad enough: three days after the last survivor had dissolved into giggling protoplasm following an intravenous feast of Masquerade, the city began a slow descent towards the Sodom Below, ultimately landing just off the coast of Maine.

The apocalypse began two hours later.

* * *

 **Father Time** offered something few Vigors ever could: a glimpse of a Columbia where Fink recovered his sanity, and not only achieved everything he'd wanted from the Vigor product line, but designs unknown to his mainstream counterpart. In most universes, Fink was undoubtedly a narcissist, a bully, an elitist and a robber baron, but baronage proved the limits of his ambitions; he never sought the Prophet's throne or aspired to rule anything other than his own little corner of the city, remaining perfectly content as Comstock's right-hand-man so long as he was allowed to leech as much money and influence as he could from the Founders. In worlds where Father Time was formulated, however, Jeremiah Fink became something _else_ entirely.

One of the strangest and most powerful Vigors ever formulated, Father Time allowed users to control the flow of time: to speed it up, slow it down, to rewind it, and even to pause it – for as long as the user's Salt levels could sustain the pause, at any rate. Indeed, the only thing the Vigor wasn't able to do was allow for actual time travel, to the Luteces' great relief.

At first, it seemed as though Father Time would follow the usual pattern of being released first to the military and then to the general public with all the extravagance peculiar to Fink MFG's marketing spiels: advertisements had already been designed and printed by the hundredfold, featuring displays of cosmetic time reversal, demonstrations of the Vigor's applications around the house, even fanciful illustrations of harried professionals using it to arrive at work on time – often replete with slogans like "Turn Back The Clock With Father Time!" "Father Time Can Make Those Dull Days Fly By!" "Father Time: Make The Merry Moments Linger!" Fink had even approved a design for the bottle – a gilded hourglass, with the neck occupied by the Vigor's logo of a spectral hand winding a watch. Within two months of the Vigor's discover and formulation, company factories were already churning out thousands of them in preparation for filling and over-the-counter sale.

And then Jeremiah Fink suffered a stroke.

He survived, but was left paralysed from the waist down, and even the most optimistic diagnoses held little hope for the great robber baron: neurosyphilis, cocaine, alcohol abuse and a high-pressure lifestyle had already taken their toll on him, and the overexcitement caused by the discovery of new Vigors had pushed his health past all reasonable limits. At the age of fifty-two, death seemed all but guaranteed for the corporate maverick.

Just when it seemed as though this iteration of Fink would be dead a full year before Daisy Fitzroy could assassinate him, one of his doctors happened to notice a prototype advertisement for Father Time left out on his patient's desk, and suggested that perhaps the new Vigor could be used to cure Fink's apoplexy. Of course, because of the dangers associated with Father Time, it took perhaps a week of additional training before the most advanced of Fink's recent test subjects – a man affectionately codenamed "The Timekeeper" – was able to perform the procedure, but eventually, the new Vigor was put to its first practical application outside of a lab. And to the surprise of everyone, it worked.

Somehow, the Timekeeper not only managed to reverse the damage and nothing else, somehow erasing the effects of syphilis, cocaine, alcohol and stress while leaving the rest of Fink's brain effectively untouched. Fink rose from his sickbed a changed man, his mind clear of addiction and dementia for the first time in years; as his diary later observed, he finally realized the scope of the mistakes he'd made over the last few years, and at long last understood the fact that his business had to change dramatically if he ever hoped to retain his wealth and power – and increase it.

Those who hoped that a cured Fink might be prove a kinder master ultimately hoped in vain: the gentleman who left the heavily-guarded sickroom that day might have recovered his sanity, but he was still in possession all the greed and ambition that had characterized his days in Columbia – and that avarice and hunger was now compounded by a desire to make up for lost time.

Fink's first move was to shut down the mass-marketing for Father Time, ordering the ad campaign scrapped and all stocks of the product itself kept under lock and key. The new Vigor was too powerful to be given to the military and the public so cavalierly, he reasoned, not with the risk of theft by the Vox Populi looming so near.

Instead, Father Time was to be made the exclusive domain of a small but highly-trained force of experts: dubbed "Timekeepers" after his beloved test subject-turned-physician, these specialists were to provide the Columbian public with a wide variety of chronokinetic services on a pay-per-use basis, but only with Fink's explicit permission. No longer would Fink MFG have its most powerful products turned against it in the same way that Possession and Electrobolt had in the past (the former of which was swiftly removed from the market under Fink's new edict). Thus, Father Time emerged as likely the only member of the new Vigor product line to possess its own official specialist.

Secondly, the Timekeepers-to-be were put through a rigorous testing procedure in which they were infused, trained, and placed under observation, just to make sure that the new Vigor-specialists weren't prone to any of the more troublesome side-effects that their lesser counterparts suffered from. Unfortunately for the rest of the world, it turned out that the symptoms were easily the subtlest of any Vigor, merely inducing a profound loss of identity and self-direction among the Timekeepers, effectively rendering them down into living forces of nature without personality or free will. They proved so quiescent that Fink was able to make them his servants merely by applying what he'd learned of indoctrination techniques so far. Just to be safe, however, they were carefully monitored just in case any new developments emerged.

Thirdly, Fink put his new servants to good use in ensuring his own longevity: in collaboration with his physicians, the Timekeepers rejuvenated Fink into his early thirties, pruned away any remaining illnesses dealt by age and poor lifestyle choices, and ultimately ensured that the robber baron was primed and ready for the next stage of his plan.

And then, in the move that would prove to be Fink's masterstroke, he had two of his Timekeepers rejuvenate _Comstock himself_ ; under the robber baron's supervision, they cured him of his cancer, undid much of the accelerated aging inflicted on him by Tear radiation, and promised to remain by his side at all times so that no assassin could ever slay him permanently. This had been intended to be both a boon and an unspoken threat on Fink's behalf, a means of demonstrating just how much the Prophet owed to him, and an implication that all those blessings could be taken away if gratitude was not in evidence.

However, Fink needn't have gone so far: the rejuvenation alone had taken the wind out of Comstock's sails. Having believed for so long and so fervently that he'd been given visions of the future through divine providence, the knowledge that he'd been wrong – that cancer would never claim him and the signs of God's "love" could be erased with a wave of a hand – left Comstock's confidence dashed. If what he'd seen was incorrect, could his prophecy of the Lamb be wrong as well? Could his dream of a purified world have been based on a falsehood? Buckling under the weight of thoughts he could no longer ignore, the fallen Prophet sank into a deep depression – one that only made him more pliable in the long run: at Fink's insistence, he gradually surrendered control of Columbia to the offices of Fink MFG; for the sake of appearances, he was still publically recognized as the head of the city's theocratic government, but behind the scenes, he was little more than Jeremiah Fink's marionette.

With Comstock firmly under the company thumb, Fink was given powers that even his mainstream counterpart couldn't have dreamed of. Among other things, the plans for the Sodom Below were scrapped: Fink did good business with the surface world, and had no intention of ruining future ventures with "the earthly governments." Though the city's theocratic façade required Fink to keep me around, from then on, he only used me as a means of producing more Vigors; and on top of assigning me a Timekeeper for my own protection and longevity, he also began plans for a breeding program, just to see if it was possible to expand Vigor production with another "miracle child."

Then, at long last, the Timekeepers were unveiled to the public in a grand exhibition. In contrast to military Vigor-specialists, these new showmen were dressed comparatively sedately: other than the immaculate white overcoats and top hats they wore, the only sign of ostentation about them were the gilded hourglass bottles of Father Time they kept chained to their belts. Nonetheless, their powers were on display throughout – reassembling broken glass, reviving dead flowers, and even stopping bullets in mid-air.

At the same exhibition, the Timekeepers' list of commissioned services was formally bulletined for the first time: if elderly citizens wished to recover their youth, they could be rejuvenated – for a significant fee; if the terminally ill or wounded needed treatment no physical could provide, the Timekeepers could restore them to full health – in exchange for an exorbitant sum; if construction or transportation needed to be sped up, the Timekeepers could fastforward time and have it done in a matter of minutes – so long as the appropriate payments were lodged to Fink MFG. Eternal youth, perfect health and instantaneous convenience were all within reach of the average citizen, so long as they had the money to pay for it. Those who couldn't afford the prices immediately were set up with a payment plan that would have them indebted to Fink for the rest of their lives.

As before, many citizens were unsettled by the powers on display, worrying that the new services the Timekeepers offered might not fit with traditional Columbian values. Ultimately, though, the benefits were too great for even these upstanding Christians to resist. Columbia had been built on a foundation of dishonesty and corruption, and a few token reassurances from Comstock were all they needed to accept the Timekeepers.

Whilst commercial Vigor-specialists such as these went about their unearthly trade around the highest strata of the city, Fink secretly had a squadron of off-the-books Timekeepers sent into Finkton to root out the Vox Populi once and for all. With a few well-placed bribes and threats – combined with the Vigor-specialists' ability to stop time – isolating the resistance movement was a simple task. Within a day and a half, every last member of the Vox Populi was rounded up and imprisoned without a single casualty incurred on the behalf of the Timekeepers.

Days later, Daisy Fitzroy and her lieutenants were executed before an audience of jeering spectators… but unknown to most of that audience, none of them remained dead for long: Fink, having long since shed the worst of his ostentation (but not all, admittedly), was determined not to waste precious resources, and cheerfully funnelled the resurrected Vox into experiments to learn new applications for Father Time.

Eventually, after a month of aging the Vox by thousands of years, regressing them into infancy, trapping them in endless loops of torture and death, or just leaving them paused in time but still conscience, the Timekeepers discovered – to Fink's delight – a means of perfectly brainwashing future Fink employees: by selectively regressing different parts of their brains, they were able to leave the Vox _just_ intelligent enough to follow orders and operate machinery, while at the same time rendering them childishly dependent on the guidance of their superiors. Now armed a means of guaranteeing total obedience _and_ naïve adherence to his mythological pantheon of animals, Fink had everything he needed to transform the inhabitants of Finkton beyond recognition; within a matter of weeks, every last resident of the slums had been rendered down into near-mindless slaves, and any basis for future rebellion had been lost forever.

With this done, Fink then extended his reach to the upper classes. Even here, there were occasionally rebels, bohemians, radicals and sympathizers with the plight of the Black and Irish populace. However, these could not be dealt with so simply as their Vox counterparts – not without drawing complaint from fellow members of their class; instead, Fink established a unique system of rehabilitation. For the rebellious teenagers and other impetuous youth, he had the Timekeepers set up a secret "Raise 'Em Right This Time" service: parents unable to control their sons and daughters would be extended an offer to correct their behaviour permanently, namely by having the offending youths regressed back to an age in which they could be tutored more effectively – "tutored" being the polite euphemism for "traumatized." From there, the re-educated children could be restored to their original age and returned to their parents… or they could be left to grow up again in as slow and painful a manner as possible, just to make sure the lesson took.

Older and more sophisticated radicals required a far gentler touch: a generous offer would be extended to them, offering certain incentives in return for their silence; if they refused, a Timekeeper would be sent after them. The following day, newspapers reported the tragic but accidental death of the offending radicals. Soon after such announcements, Columbia's orphanages invariably welcomed a new consignment of unwanted children into their ranks.

And there were darker acts committed, either by Fink's design or with his permission: entertainers found themselves trapped in endless temporal loops, doomed to repeat the same performance for as long as the audience enjoyed it; police interrogations became so brutal that suspects were often killed outright – and then brought back by the Timekeeper in attendance for another round of torture; office workers were imprisoned at their desks for months on end, only to discover that no time at all had passed outside their departments; doting parents unwilling to see their beloved children grow up and leave the nest could simply have them regressed back to infancy and raised again – as many times as they could pay for it; more possessive parents had certain rooms of their houses infused with temporal fields to prevent their sons and daughters from aging at all, preserving them like flies in amber for as long as they could be imprisoned inside their nurseries. For families who wanted more children on an immediate basis, pregnancies could pass in less than an hour and begin again just as quickly… and though Columbia's stance on women's rights was astonishingly progressive by the standards of the time, Fink's new shadow government was more than willing to look the other way if a paying customer wanted the pregnancies to continue against the mother's wishes.

There were even prisons where inmates were condemned to live out their sentences as bicentennial ancients, trapped in deteriorating, barely-mobile bodies and left in conditions designed to leave them in agony – freezing in concrete cells, tumbling down flights of stairs, and more often than not left soaking in their own faeces. A few particularly twisted penitentiaries did the reverse, and instead had prisoners regressed to as young as four years old, doomed to spend their days on menial labour in worse-than-workhouse conditions, and their nights in labyrinthine complexes specifically designed to bring out the very worst in childhood nightmares.

And eventually, the Columbia-wide business grew so prosperous that Fink was able to expand his ties with the Sodom Below, and begin making deals with several prominent companies throughout the surface world, offering eternal youth to wealthy businessmen in exchange for difficult-to-acquire resources. In 1921, this bargain was extended to government officials, and perhaps two years later, Columbia opened diplomatic relations with the Sodom Below. In exchange for the services it could offer to the governments of the world, the city was allowed to remain independent – a "mercenary state." The true nature of these services remained unknown to most of the world, just as the pact between Columbia and the "serpent of nations" remained unknown to the citizens of Fink's airborne dominion.

By the 1950s, Jeremiah Fink was the wealthiest businessman on Earth.

By 1984, he was effectively president of the world in all but name, his influence over governments, corporations and even world religions allowing him to manipulate the world in almost any way he pleased.

Needless to say, iterations of this reality where the Luteces chose to interfere were astronomically rare: Booker wouldn't have stood a chance against the Timekeepers in most variations, and even direct aid from the Luteces wouldn't have done much good against an enemy that could undo virtually any victory they achieve.

The only circumstances in which Rosalind and Robert did decide to pit my father against Fink's new Columbia usually involved an unexpected turn of the tide: in realities such as these, the attempt to intimidate Comstock had gone wrong, instead prompting him to declare Fink a heretic and a blasphemer. As a result, a civil war ignited between the Prophet and the robber baron – one that only became more protracted once Comstock was able to capture a stockpile of Father Time and create his own Timekeepers.

As such, it was only once the two had been forced into a temporary stalemate that the Luteces felt safe in sending Booker Dewitt to Columbia in their latest attempt to rescue me… and though the old Constants and Variables had returned, this proved to be one of the strangest journeys any version of Booker had experienced.

In the temporal tug-of-war that had overtaken the city, Columbia had been distorted into a patchwork of warped timezones and bizarre chronokinetic phenomena: the Finkton factories and the slums below technically existed in two different iterations across the city, one of which Comstock had claimed as his own in order to fuel his war effort; businesses on Harmony Lane randomly flickered in and out of existence, often taking unsuspecting customers with them; clouds flowed backwards over Town Centre, wind sweeping the rosebushes in reverse and stormclouds inhaling raindrops from the streets; people who had yet to exist emerged from the waters of the Garden Of New Eden, warping between infancy and old age and back again; the Hall of Heroes often took unsuspecting guests on joyrides through the time-space continuum, offering them visions of the very places the exhibits portrayed.

Even the faction headquarters weren't safe: Fink's offices became a twisted paradise where youth was instantly bestowed on any man or woman who entered, where executives spent their days in a orgiastic haze of lust, drugs and merciless depravity; by contrast, Comstock House became a stultified, lifeless temple to stagnation, where time never passed and scars from the outside world were enshrined as holy relics… and Monument Island, a contested region constantly fought over by warring armies of Timekeepers, had become a wild mosaic of frozen time zones and narrow safety corridors through the madness.

And between the major zones, bubbles of random time blossomed over the rooftops of the residential districts, across the beaches of Battleship Bay, throughout Soldier's Field, and even in the sculptured boulevards of Emporia. Anyone engulfed by these bubbles was subjected to the brief but startling vagaries of random chronokinesis – aging, regressing, freezing and duplicating at random – and often attracted their fair share of gamblers, thrillseekers and drunks interested in seeing what would happened if they stepped inside one.

Booker had to travel quite extensively through these areas, and changed so extensively that it was a marvel that I was still able to recognize him by the end of our journey – especially once our tinkering with dimensional physics accidentally undid the Vox Populi's brainwashing. On the upside, it did mean that Booker didn't have to worry about being recognized quite so often, though it did result in a few amusing moments where I had to carry his now-oversized gear for him until he normalized.

In the end, the Columbia of the Timekeepers was erased from the multiverse like all the others… but not before one iteration of Booker and I happened to notice something rather unusual during the Vox Populi uprising, just before Fink was assassinated. Happening to arrive at his office a little earlier than in other variations, we found him hunched over a jerry-rigged Lutece portal, almost identical to the one that Comstock had used to look into the possibility space. At first, I thought he was trying to flee through it, but as the robber baron struggled to calibrate the machines, it soon became clear that his aim was not escape, but communication.

"Come on," he ranted furiously, as the gunshots of the advancing Vox echoed closer and closer. "Speak to me! You spoke to Comstock long before he met that maladjusted little whore of a scientist, long before he even thought of getting into politics! He said he only heard your voice through this damnable contraption once, but once is enough as far as I'm concerned: _answer me!_ Tell me how to get out of this madness! I did everything right and it still went wrong! Give me a way out of this! SPEAK TO ME!"

Then the portal sparked to life, just long enough for a Tear to open – only for a few seconds, but enough for a voice to ripple across the divide between realities.

" _My words are only for my worshippers,"_ it whispered. _"You are not among them. But fear not. All will hear my voice in time…"_

* * *

A/N: Up next... **the epilogue.**


	11. Lessons To Be Learned

A/N: Aaaaaand here we are ladies and gentlemen! The final chapter! Don't worry, I'm not going to end this the same way I began - ie, bitching about Burial At Sea. Believe me, I've finally gotten all that out of my head. I'm just going to issue a colossal thank-you to all my viewers, reviewers, favouriters and followers: this story would have been nothing without you!

Disclaimer: Bioshock Infinite is not mine, nor the Bioshock franchise in general. Also, I've provided another paragraph of references just under the second horizontal line; for those of you interested in making a game of this, see which ones you can recognize - and try to guess which entries are secretly original creations.

* * *

At the beginning of this chronicle, I asked myself why I bothered to archive these histories. At the time, I said that I wanted someone to learn from its mistakes… and as I've continued my research, I've found myself only reaffirming this vow. Now, there are even more lessons to be learned.

Columbia may be gone, but the madness that plagued it endures in a thousand failed utopias and dystopian hellscapes across the possibility space – just as it always has. Just look at Rapture, Andrew Ryan's refuge from the horrors of the surface world, where no gods or kings would reign, only man. The same passion that made the genius of Rapture possible slowly degenerated into dogma and obsession, and gradually transformed the once-glorious streets of Rapture into a drowning necropolis, a hellish cesspool of violence, addiction and insanity.

Once, the Founders of Columbia had good intentions: they truly believed they were creating a monument to America, not a totalitarian substitute for it, that their grand merger of technology and faith could light the way for a happier, more prosperous United States. But as time went on and the city grew more isolated from external influences, idealism mutated into extremism; dissenting voices among the Founder elite either left Columbia in disgust or fell victim to "Vox anarchists." All who remained were the hardliners, the most ardent and remorseless of all Comstock's followers, those who not only believed in his apocalyptic vision of the future, but would accept any order he gave – no matter how monstrous – if it meant making that vision a reality.

Even Comstock's speeches began to change as time went on: before Peking, his sermons appeared inspirational, even saintly, portraying Columbia as a utopia and his ascension to the role of Prophet a sign that grace was within reach of everyone; nobody could have guessed at his cataclysmic designs from listening to these proclamations. But as the turn of the century neared, his lessons became more extreme, his doctrine more intolerant, often discussing the instructive nature of cruelty and the righteousness of Columbia's increasingly brutal race laws. By 1905, the Founding Fathers were being venerated as saints, Abraham Lincoln had been demonized as the antichrist, and Comstock's fire-and-brimstone rhetoric now heralded an apocalypse ordained by God and ushered in by Columbia.

In the end, with the world below unable to stop him and no opposition remaining among his inner circle, Comstock's need to absolve himself of guilt drove him to enshrine the very sins he claimed to crusade against, and his desperate wish to escape the prejudice of his past drove him to justify it – again and again. Slavery and racism blossomed, the latter more grotesque even than the standards of the time, and Columbia gradually decayed from its outwardly optimistic beginnings into a caricatured theocratic nightmare.

And the Vox Populi, the revolutionary movement that might have steered Columbia into a kinder future? Year after year of attrition by the Founders weeded out the moderates and hardened the survivors, warping the ideals of freedom and equality into a brutal doctrine of vengeful annihilation – aided in no small part by my own ill-advised tampering with the space-time continuum.

How can anyone learn, I wonder, if I chose to leave those stories untold?

* * *

That was my initial reasoning… but as my research has continued and I've learned more about Columbia's deeper secrets - particularly among the Vigors - I've found another lesson to consider among the horror stories of Jeremiah Fink's blind avarice: all the monsters that the Luteces discovered across the possibility space _are still out there._

Hecate, Sutter Cane, the Chaos Gods, Bill Cipher, the Dreamers, Nyarlathotep, Winter's Maw, the Filth, the Weaver, Morrigan Lugus, the Hyperbreed Omnibeasts, Mad Jim Jaspers, Persephone of The Lost, Dajaal, the Great Watchmaker, the Wamphyri, He-Who-Once-Slumbered, Threat Null, Proteus the Mask, the Hallowed Guests, Mama Sanguine, Papa Madness, the Reapers, Alma Wade, the Moon That Never Sets, Dormammu, the Crooked Man, Maldis, the End of the Cycle, the Not-God…

All of them are still ruling over their respective domains; all of them have powers that would make Columbia's purge of the Sodom Below look like the fall of a sandcastle… and far too many of them are on the lookout for fresh playgrounds.

And then there's the Archangel Columbia.

For the longest time, I believed she was just a fantasy, a symptom of Comstock's self-deluding religious mania, a means of disguising his observations of the Tears as genuine prophecy. But then I began watching his progression from newly-baptised convert to self-styled prophet, replaying the memories that remained preserved within the possibility space. I still don't know what I was looking for; maybe I wanted to refute the myth of the Angel once and for all, maybe I was desperately hoping I'd find an understandable reason for what the Prophet eventually did.

One way or another, I soonrealized that Comstock's first documented visitation by the Angel and his vision of the city occurred several years prior to the day he met Rosalind Lutece. This date could have been a lie, or at the very least a symptom of madness, but that still wouldn't explain how he happened to be in _exactly_ the right place at the right time to meet Rosalind and sponsor her experiments, nor would it explain how Comstock somehow met the woman who could make his dreams a reality purely by chance.

As far as I could tell, Comstock's encounter with the Angel had not occurred on pristine farmland under a sun-drenched sky as Columbian propaganda later claimed, but in the midst of a fever that had left him drifting in and out of consciousness for almost three days. Alas, I still can't read minds, so I've no idea what he dreamed of, but Comstock recorded the events of the dream quite thoroughly in his journal – though he eventually destroyed this record in order to have his vision appropriately glamorized.

Assuming this document can be trusted, the Angel appeared to him as a being of infinite majesty and horrific beauty, wings of sculpted flame, eyes as black as night, a body of fused metal and flesh, and a face that was at once loving and merciless. She spoke to him in a haunting voice that echoed and often overlapped its own speech, presenting herself as a messenger of God and entrusting him with a destiny unknown to any mortal before him.

"Rejoice," she had proclaimed. "For I bring an answer to your prayers: the world may indeed be cleansed of all corruption, the unrighteous kings toppled from their thrones, the wicked and unfaithful cast into the fiery pit, and the innocent granted eternal respite from their agonies. God in his infinite wisdom has given you the tools to end sin forever. You have but to reach out and claim them as your own. Do this, and you will be exalted as no other man before you, for you will be God's chosen voice on Earth: his instrument, his sword, his Prophet. Your seed shall carry on your glorious legacy long after you have left to claim your eternal reward, and by their deeds shall the work of purification continue… but only if you embrace this chance as God has embraced you."

And then a vision of Columbia – as it would be – appeared before him.

"Seek out Rosalind Lutece," the Angel proclaimed. "She will provide you with the means of building this heaven on Earth. I can show you where she will be and how to recognize, but you must do the rest."

"What must I do, Angel?" Comstock had asked. "How can I go about cleansing this world? Where can I even begin?"

"You hold the answers within your heart, Prophet," she replied. "I can only show you the path to paradise: you must attain it on your own. Rejoice, for your world will one day join the others God has enfolded in his embrace, and you shall be a part of his infinite glory. Now kneel and pay homage to God, and never forget this message – or the messenger."

Again, this could be nothing more than delusion, but I have studied every aspect of that fateful night, and the Tear activity surrounding Comstock's home was simply too potent for me to dismiss it as coincidence.

Curiously enough, Comstock also scrawled a list of names he'd heard that night in the margins of this document – a list of the many names of his God. He later scribbled them out, clearly believing he'd still been fever-ridden when he'd wrote them down, perhaps hoping he might forget them entirely. But the possibility space never forgets, and this list remained plainly visible to me.

I know the true names of Comstock's God.

The Watchful Infinity.

Angelikos.

She-Who-Must-Be-Worshipped.

Shodanus.

The Queen of the Spaces Beyond.

Ko-L'um-biarh.

.Stellar Crown.

Tzhuv-N'iq'roth,

Mother of the Depths.

Kahlumbiah, the winged lady.

The Archangel Columbia.

For a time, I almost believed this revelation had somehow redeemed Comstock, as if the Angel's sponsorship of the Prophet somehow absolved him of his crimes. In the end, though, I was once again acting out of optimism without heed to human nature: I was looking for proof that nobody could ever do something so monstrous of their own free will, and I thought I'd found my proof. It took a very frank and earnest discussion with Rosalind Lutece – my cynical mentor as always – to help me see the light.

Comstock received orders from the Angel exactly once in his entire life. On all other occasions, he was simply peering into other realities for answers and weaving what he'd seen into false prophecies. And in that first and last missive he'd received, Comstock was only told to build Columbia and use it bring the world to righteousness.

The Angel never told him to lie to the public.

She didn't command him to oppress Columbia's Black and Irish populace.

She wasn't responsible for the political purges and massacres conducted throughout the city.

She never gave Jeremiah Fink permission to claim the poor as his playthings, or run roughshod over the general public with dangerous products culled from nightmare realities.

She didn't ordain me as Comstock's successor; she didn't arrange to have my grief-stricken father hounded until he finally agreed to sell me to Comstock; and she never once voiced the idea that I should be locked away in the tower.

She never told him to murder his wife and blame it all on Daisy Fitzroy.

She didn't order the Luteces' assassination.

And she _definitely_ wasn't the one who had me tortured and broken.

The angel may have set Comstock on the path, may have helped speed his corruption along, and likely intended to profit from his stewardship of Columbia, but in the end, the Prophet's crimes are entirely of his own making.

But the most disturbing thing of all is that Comstock wasn't the first mortal to be corrupted in this way.

Across the multiverse, I have seen worlds that worshipped the Angel as a goddess, even dimensions where she supposedly appeared in person before her worshippers… and many of them have suffered for it.

Post-apocalyptic nightmares with populations reduced to feral cannibalism, totalitarian police states with no purpose bar the accruing of power, gilded cages housing populations of hedonistic man-children oblivious to the outside world, monumental holy cities where worshippers live in filth and mutation for the pleasure of their goddess, galaxy-spanning research facilities run by fallen scientists experimenting for pleasure and little else, playgrounds for the most insane and depraved individuals from across the possibility space… and so many more.

All for the sake of expanding the Angel's interdimensional kingdom.

And that is why – more than any other reason – I continue to archive these lost histories and explore these far-flung realities.

Because Columbia may be gone, but the Angel who bears her name lives on.

And she's watching us.

THE END


End file.
